Primer on apostrophes
Apostrophes can be confusing, but they can be mastered. Here are some guidelines for using this punctuation mark correctly, according to Mignon Fogarty on Quick and Dirty Tips.
Category: Grammar Repair Shop
Filler up!
We all use filler words, or vocal disfluencies, in our daily speech. The junk food of the applied linguistics world, they come off as sloppy and faltering. We should try to banish them, especially from our professional speech as much as possible. Right? Well, not necessarily.
‘Quick, hand me a … skin covering device!’
Many purists might cling to the rule that if you’re not using Band-Aid brand bandages, then don’t call them Band-Aids. But there are many everyday items that are better known for their brand names rather than their generic names.
Words, Words, Words: January ’20
Write it right, say it right, spell it right.
Choose just the right word
Learn the difference between five similar pairs of words.
Whoa, whoa … easy on those commas!
Commas are intended to help the reader comprehend a sentence more easily. Unnecessary ones are a distraction. Here are three places not to put a comma, from Barron’s Essentials of English.
Clean up your sentences with parallelism
Parallelism brings consistent grammatical construction to each part of a sentence, making it friendlier to the ear.
Put your modifiers in the right spot
YOLO! That’s You Only Live Once. However, the correct phrase should be You Live Only Once. Let’s take a look at what can happen to a sentence when you move the word only around.
A helpful grammar hand from the AP
From @APStylebook, a Twitter feed run by the Associated Press, some very handy hints from recent online chats, collected by PR Newswire.
Which word should I use?
Here are five potential confusers.