Editors at Merriam-Webster (M-W) caused quite a stir when they tweeted on September 17, 2019, that the nonbinary pronoun they had been added to the dictionary. Their tweet addresses a question I still hear frequently, even three years later: can they (or them or...
Three issues often arise during graduation season. One concerns the verb to graduate. Another concerns the need for apostrophes in the expressions associate’s degree, master’s degree, and bachelor’s degree. And the third issue concerns which programs...
Collective nouns are words that refer to—you guessed it—a collection of individuals (people or animals) or things taken as a whole. Though these words appear singular, they represent a group; examples include team, jury, faculty, class, choir, family, and committee....
The rules for capitalizing words in sentences (as opposed to capitalizing words in headings or the titles of publications or a person’s job title or military rank) seem simple at first glance: we capitalize proper words, and we lowercase common ones. But because...
In another article, we address the challenge of knowing when words need to be capitalized in sentences because they are proper and not common nouns. This article focuses on the narrower question of when to capitalize a job title or military rank. Just Say No: Chances...
