One subscriber wrote to ask how to determine whether to use a or an in front of a noun. Like many of us, he had been taught simply to put a in front of consonants and an in front of vowels, but he realized that this oversimplified rule didn’t work in every case....
Our word processing software and enhanced keyboards can work magic, especially in regard to inserting characters and symbols that aren’t on our Roman alphabet keyboards. Lawyers and legal secretaries must type a section symbol in legal citations, whereas bankers...
Most of us were taught never to split infinitives, but writers have been splitting them anyway—even long before Star Trek provided us with perhaps the most famous split infinitive, “to boldly go.” Those of us taught to regard the split infinitive as anathema...
When we refer to the title of a work, how do we know whether to use italics or quotation marks? Italics for Works That Stand Alone With some exceptions, most style books tell us to use italics when we write the title of a work that stands alone as a single entity....
This site addresses a number of confusing word pairs, including less and fewer, effect and affect, and lie and lay. Sometimes writers are confused by the difference between the one-word modifiers anymore and everyday and the two-word phrases “any more”...
