From the category archives:

Grammar

National Grammar Day: A Quiz

March 4, 2010

Believe it or not, today–March 4–is National Grammar Day. To help celebrate this auspicious occasion, and to further grammar education throughout the Internet (always capitalized, incidentally), I have combed through hundreds–maybe even thousands–of blog entries to bring you the following quiz.

What you are about to see are errors of usage I have collected over the past [...]

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Two-Minute Drill: The Comma Splice

February 4, 2010

For some reason, discussion of comma splices is on the upswing lately. I’ve run across it at least three times in recent weeks; most recently, at Copyediting’s Fiddly Rules Podcast #12.1 Because it’s unlikely you visit the same websites (or subscribe to the same blogs) as I do, I thought I’d give a quick lesson [...]

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A Pro and Con View of Language

February 2, 2010

I was talking with a friend on Saturday, and our discussion caused my thoughts to spin off on a totally unrelated tangent (although I eventually brought it back to a point we were discussing). I asked,  “Do you know why I love words so much?”
And suddenly that started me off on a dissertation I had [...]

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Weekly Word Count: January 22

January 22, 2010

What Is This?
Following the lead of my mentor, friend, and exemplar, Tami Moore, this is a weekly article to document progress in meeting my writing goals as described here.
 
I set up an Excel spreadsheet to track all my work by category (blog post, copyediting work, creative writing) and item. So all I [...]

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Two-Minute Drill: Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda, and More

January 20, 2010

Wouldn’t writing in English be so much easier if we could just write out words, or combinations of words, the way they sound? Instead of typing out forget about it, I could simply write fuggedaboudit and be done.
Of course, if I’m writing dialogue, I can do such things, if the character’s vernacular is such that [...]

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Passive and Possessive—Pronouns for Pros

January 18, 2010

How about some mad props for the alliterative title? Hopefully, it caught your attention and prompted you to read more. So without further ado….
First, let’s be sure we’re all on the same page with respect to what pronouns are. They are words we substitute for nouns, generally to avoid repeating the nouns each time we [...]

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Two-Minute Drill: Allude and Elude

January 12, 2010

This post is the first in what I hope will be a series of short (two minutes to read) articles highlighting commonly confused or misused words.
I was reading a blog article yesterday, and the following sentence caught my eye. Then it made me grit my teeth. Fortunately, I have a dentist appointment Thursday for [...]

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Grammar Potpourri: Homophones

January 11, 2010

When I first discussed grammar and punctuation back in mid-September (was it that long ago?), many of you commented about things I hadn’t included. Today, I’m going to address some of those. If there are others I don’t discuss today, rest assured they will be covered Some Day Soon.TM
Before I list some of the more [...]

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Capital Ideas

January 5, 2010

As I kick off a new series of grammar and punctuation articles to kick off the new year, I figured we might as well start at the top. Based on a suggestion on Twitter from Tami, aka @tami_moore, I’m going to tackle capitalization: when, how, and where.
The Rules
There are some conventions to be followed when [...]

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