Other posts in this blog are devoted to writing and editing concerns, but this one is not. A few years ago, a neighbor asked if I would have coffee with her college-bound son and give him some advice. Having made a list of thoughts to share, I decided to clean it up...
Did You Say What You Think You Said? Misplaced Participles Recently, in part one of our series on misplaced modifiers, we explored how word order can affect the clarity of a sentence. That post looked at familiar one-word modifiers such as only and almost, and it also...
When we think of conjunctions, most of us think of single words: and, but, therefore, although, and the rest of the coordinating, adverbial, and subordinating conjunctions. But when conjunctions work in pairs, we call them correlatives because they link two...
Elsewhere on this site, we discuss the importance of parallel structure in vertical (bulleted) lists. But two or more parts of a sentence, clause, or phrase should be grammatically parallel even without bullets (or numbers or letters). This article focuses on parallel...
Careful writers ensure that items in a list are parallel with one another in both meaning and form. That is, all items must be both logically and grammatically similar; when they are, the information is more coherent and easier to absorb. Today, we’re looking...
