Last week, I wrote a post I didn’t write. In the introductory paragraph, I clearly stated that it was a mash-up of two similar — and, to many people, familiar — packages of pronouncements...
The rich vocabulary of the theatrical world has inspired use of various terms of the art in other realms of human endeavor. Many of them are also employed in (or to refer to) politics — which, ...
1. Number Collisions In the sentence “The day the slain woman was to turn 28, 3,000 gathered at a church to recall her life,” the proximity of her age (assuming it is styled numerically rather than s...
What’s the difference between principal and principle? The principle is of principal importance. Here’s the background for these close cousins, as well as related terms. Principal derives by way of F...
A couple of years ago, we noticed that the demand for online freelance writers was booming. The Internet was becoming the predominant medium for companies to reach their customers, and people were sp...
Business writing, or any communication for other than personal reasons, requires a higher standard of compositional conduct. Whether you are requesting service or complaining about it, or applying fo...
In a recent article, the Los Angeles Times reported on a survey that found that the level of sophistication in oratory in the US Congress has declined. That conclusion reminds me of a reading-compreh...
Do you need to specialize in subject matter to be a successful writer or editor? You’ll get different answers from publishing professionals, and both “Yes” and “No” are correct. The devil’s in the de...
From usual suspects to obscure gems, from grammar guides to usage resources, here are some websites of great value to writers: 1. Amazon.com You may have heard of this website — a good place, I...
A stock element of effective writing is to employ a quotation by a noted writer or other famous person to illustrate a point. But take care that when you seek to strengthen your work by alluding dire...
The contents of this post are an alphabetical arrangement of two lists that have been circulating among writers and editors for many years. In case you have missed out all this time, I’m sharing here...
Question: How many dictionaries does it take to screw up the word lightbulb? Answer: How many you got? I’m mildly irritated whenever I see lightbulb styled as two words in an article or a book. (I ca...
Did you read under the covers with a flashlight late into the night when you were a child? Have you been methodically working your way through the Great Works of Literature since the onset of puberty...
Have you ever noticed the similarity in vocalization when you utter words starting with wh- and those beginning with qu-? Go ahead and try it now. Don’t be embarrassed — nobody’s looking. Huh &...
When a sentence begins with “A number of,” should the verb that follows be singular, or plural? For example, when a sentence refers to a number of objections being raised, is was correct, or should y...
What’s the difference between a focus and a locus — is it all just hocus-pocus? — and where does nexus fit in? The technical meaning of focus is “a point of convergence or divergence, or ...
Writers are sometimes confused about when to attach any, every, and no to one or body as a closed compound and when to treat one of these word pairs as just that: a two-word phrase. Here are guidelin...
Three dots. Dot, dot, dot. What could be simpler? Then why do those dots make so many writers dotty? The rules for use of ellipses are not as simple as they seem. But they are manageable. First, a de...
Are you a locavore? Probably not — it’s still a fringe movement — but you should know what it means, even if you do not consider yourself a member of the class. A discussion of locavore a...
In the same day, this site received, among readers’ responses to my recent post Courtesy Titles and Honorifics, two diverse email messages: One was a reasonable, well-written support of the writer’s ...
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, has been widely celebrated as one of the masterworks of English usage. Time magazine listed it as one of the one hundred most influential...
Which comparative adjectival term meaning “more advanced in age” is more correct in usage? Many people still prefer to use elder and its superlative eldest, but they tend to be, well, older; the choi...
Military terminology and slang is a rich source of expressive expressions. Most, like “bite the bullet,” are clichés, but some, such as “bomber crew,” are unusual (so much so, sometimes, that in writ...
Words with the antonymic prefix dis- are easily confused with similar-looking terms starting with mis- or un- that usually have differing connotations or entirely distinct senses. Here are comparativ...
There was a time when it was considered proper form to refer indirectly to people in writing with a courtesy title or an honorific — a designation that identifies gender, profession, or title o...
1. Earth Through in modern usage our planet’s Latin name, Terra, appears only in science fiction, the adjective terrestrial is often employed to refer to phenomena associated with Earth or with land ...
Appropriately enough, the self-centered word self, when combined with others, sometimes gets special treatment. Self, as a prefix, is attached by a hyphen to other words in several parts of speech. T...
What’s the difference between denounce and renounce? Their related Latin ancestors shared a neutral sense, but in English they acquired exclusively condemnatory connotations. Denounce is externally d...
Errors of organization plague writing — not just in overall structure or paragraph formation but also even within sentences. One frequent problem is a misunderstanding about how multiple elemen...
How do you determine whether the adverbial form of an adjective should end in -ly or -ally? For most adjectives, the reason to use -ally, rather than -ly, is that you’re adding -ly to a noun plus the...
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