Be wary of the words you choose. They may mean something entirely different from what you thought they meant. Someone posted on Facebook...

Don’t be niggardly with the hyphen. Doing so can wreak havoc. On the other hand, insert those little sawed-off lines in the right places,...

Today’s topic is probably the most frequent grammatical error, which abounds in newspapers and every type of literature to be found. The...

It’s l-ementary. Pairing or paring the l In certain words, the double l is required. In others, depending on whether the language is...

Like a yokel at a party of snobs, the dangling modifier looks so uncomfortable. He’s out of place and doesn’t know how to get the heck...

It’s become a full-fledged epidemic. Perhaps the best evidence of the deterioration of English language usage in America is the misuse of...

Preventive Gerontologist, Dr. Arnold Bretsky, recommends this … That’s the beginning of a sentence from a newspaper advertorial urging...

Call them murdered modifiers, muddied modifiers, massacred modifiers – or, perhaps most accurate, misunderstood modifiers. They all...

What gives? There is another redundancy that pops up often in the print and broadcast media, in ads, on bloggers’ sites, and in...

Including from, including on, including in, including at … . Enough already. What I wanna know is: including what? Spare the word and...

Writers who get too hyphen happy end up with cluttered copy, despite the apparently skewed vision of some who think they look so dashing....

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” And God was and is everywhere. And so is the word...

HELP! Spare me from redundant use of the word. Redundancy reigns It is ubiquitous in combination with another verb, when either that verb...

Do you ever read a newspaper story, an advertisement, an essay or some other piece of literature and feel as though you’re being jerked...

Okay, listen up! Which is it: hark back, harken back, or hearken back? Hark, harken and hearken all mean the same thing: to listen. And...

Do people die anymore? I mean, I know our life expectancy is on the rise, but surely the human species has not achieved immortality....

Tranquil — naturally About two years ago, I began seeing a holistically oriented doctor. His practice was based on prevention and...

“As well as” can be expected Weighty issue How often do you see a sentence with a series of items separated by commas, and “as well as”...

No Commoners Here My all-time favorite cartoon appeared in The New Yorker a few decades ago. A woman in a long formal gown and...

“And Shutterfly expects full-year revenue to be between $903 million to $920 million.” That sentence was in an investment newsletter...