Short Story Competition: Sixth Batch Is Open for Voting!

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In the Last Throes

An amusing egg-corn that has just appeared on my radar is that of writing in the throes of as "in the throws of."

2 2024-12-03 08:51 查看原文

Farther, Further: What's the Difference?

Some authorities offer differentiated meanings for farther and further, but the short answer to the question of which to use for what is that you can just

2 2024-12-21 17:03 查看原文

Prodigal vs. Prodigy

Prodigal means “to spend wastefully.” So, what does that have to do with the biblical parable of the prodigal son, and what does being prodigal have to do

1 2024-11-27 03:47 查看原文

3 More Examples of Misplaced Modifiers

Words and phrases that provide additional information to clarify relationships between people, places, or things should, for the sake of clarity, be carefully

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Intrusive Misuse of Colons

Writers often mistakenly introduce intrusive “colonization” where it is not necessarily. In each of the following examples, as explained in the discussion,

3 2024-12-19 20:07 查看原文

5 Types of Unnecessary Hyphenation

The sentences below, each followed by a discussion and a revision, illustrate various ways in which a hyphen is used extraneously.

1 2024-11-29 14:18 查看原文

3 Sentences with Punctuation Problems

Commas serve a vital function as a fundamental organizing tool within sentences, acting as buffers that keep syntactical elements in place and as signals that

1 2024-11-29 08:54 查看原文

Metaphorical Usage and Scare Quotes

Writers often mistakenly believe they are being helpful when, in the act of using a word or phrase in a nonliteral sense, they frame the term in quotation

1 2024-11-29 09:55 查看原文

3 Common Types of Phrasal-Adjective Hyphenation Errors

One of the most ubiquitous categories of error in written composition is failure to provide a visual clue to readers that two or more words preceding a noun

1 2024-11-27 14:35 查看原文

The Dash Family's Roles

The en dash is the oft-neglected middle sibling of the horizontal-line family of symbols that serve to connect words and numbers for various reasons.

1 2024-11-28 19:17 查看原文

5 Categories of Unnecessary Scare Quotes

Each of the sentences in this post demonstrates a distinct example of superfluous use of quotation marks to call attention to a word or phrase. The discussion

1 2024-12-16 22:16 查看原文

3 Types of Superfluous Use of Semicolons

Proper use of semicolons is sometimes seen as such a challenge that some teachers of composition recommend not using them until one develops a more

1 2024-11-30 10:06 查看原文

Time to Re-Read Orwell?

George Orwell didn't have time to collect many royalties on his phenomenally successful novel 1984.

2 2024-11-28 07:26 查看原文

How to Focus When You're Writing

Do you ever find yourself distracted when you’re writing?

1 2024-11-27 07:47 查看原文

How to Write a Great Blog Post

Blog posts might look straightforward, but if you’ve ever tried to write one, you may have found it was harder than you expected.

1 2024-11-27 14:34 查看原文

3 Strategies for Combining Sentences

One approach to making prose more concise is to stitch together two related sentences by revising one so that it serves as a subordinate clause to the other

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Punctuating Appositives

A reader requests clarification on the punctuation of appositives:

2 2024-11-30 04:47 查看原文

Useful Stock Phrases for Your Business Emails

When I wrote a post on email etiquette, one reader, Juan, left a comment to ask for some advice (I’ve changed his punctuation a bit for clarity’s sake):

2 2024-11-29 02:12 查看原文

Classic vs. Classical

What’s the difference between classic and classical? Both words, befitting their roots in the word class, refer to quality, but the meanings are distinct.

1 2024-12-23 19:03 查看原文

Prevaricate vs Procrastinate

Two commonly confused words are prevaricate and procrastinate. They are similar in being quite formal, Latinate, words but have different meanings.

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