Everything and anything about grammar.
Many people say your sentences shouldn’t contain a split infinitive. In my early years of school, teachers drummed this rule into students’ heads—usually right after ensuring they wouldn’t end sentences with prepositions. Let’s first look at the issue of spit infinitives, and then we’ll show why it isn’t an issue. I realize I said I…
Grammar Doesn’t Have to Be Difficult Grammar is difficult for a lot of people, but it doesn’t need to be. The biggest hurdle to learning grammar is the terminology. Most books, and most teachers, use grammatical terms when they’re not necessary. While researching my book, I ran across the following terms on more than a…
When and where are often used interchangeably, as in I only use commas in the parts of sentences (when/where) I need to pause. Despite that, when to use “when” and where to use “where” follow a set of rules. While either when or where sounds okay in that situation, a close analysis of the sentence will…
Eg/Ie/Ergo/Et Al/Etc. There are some people, especially those in the legal and insurance professions (as well as writers), who love to use Latin abbreviations or Latin expressions. There’s nothing wrong with that, but, far too often, I have seen them used improperly. The problem with using Latin expressions is if you’re going to use them—many…
That’s right; anyways is not a word. Despite what you may have heard on numerous TV shows (especially NYPD Blue), the correct pronunciation is anyway without an “s.” So you’d say: ✅ “I’m going to do it anyway.” Not … ❌ “I’m going to do it anyways. I was going to do this post a while ago,…
People who write for a living, such as writers and journalists, have usually had more than a few years of training by the time they become professionals. With that in mind, you’d think they would find it easy to determine whether a word should be capitalized or left lowercased. But capitalization rules don’t tell you…
DOUBLE NEGATIVES Children learn this so-called double-negatives rule right after their “ABCs” or it seems that way. When I was a kid, if a teacher heard you say “I don’t got no . . .” or anything resembling that phrase, you were bent over the desk and rewarded with a beating (usually with a fiberglass yardstick). I realize teachers…
This post is more for the professional crowd. I may have mentioned that I worked as a headhunter for more than thirty years. During that time, I got a lot of résumés—more than twelve thousand of them. One thing that used to jump out at me was how people tried so hard to use two-dollar…
Lie, Lay, Laid, and Lain Every day I see many instances of poor grammar, words being misused, punctuation used improperly, and more. Does it bother me? Not really. But the problem is there’s no need for it. Unless you’re in a profession where grammar is important, people soon forget the grammatical explanations they learned when…
Hyphens and How to Use Them When it comes to hyphenation, prose often suffers from the Goldilocks effect: either too much or too little, but seldom just right. Here are some erroneously constructed elements along with repaired revisions that let them eat, sit, or sleep with contentment. With no more delay, we’ll start. If we…