Bi and Semi as Prefixes
If you receive a paycheck on the fifteenth and thirtieth of each month, are you paid bimonthly or semimonthly? If a newspaper is published every two weeks, it is a biweekly or a semimonthly publication? The answer is not simple. If we check Webster’s for definitions...
Misplaced Participles
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...
Beware the One-Word Misplaced Modifier
One noteworthy characteristic of effective writers is their logical and strategic arrangement of words. They know that to convey their messages accurately, their sentences must be clear and unambiguous. They also know that careless word order—in particular, the...
Names: Making Them Plural and NOT Possessive
Each year, as the festive season approaches and people make plans to send holiday greetings, many of us would benefit from a reminder about how to make last names plural. (Hint: Apostrophes need not apply.) If we pause to think, we will likely remember that...
Which, Who, and That: Singular or Plural?
Many of my posts include a quiz introduced by some form of the question “Which of the following sentences are problematic?” More than one subscriber has written to suggest that in this opening question, the plural verb are should instead be the singular verb is. That...
Punctuating with Parentheses
This site addresses a number of punctuation issues, including punctuating with quotation marks, choosing between parentheses and dashes, using the semicolon and colon, and deciding when to use the Oxford comma. Here we are focusing specifically on punctuating with...
Are You “Anxious” or “Eager”?
The following sentences offer a choice between anxious and eager. Which word is more accurate in each case? Our children are (anxious/eager) to go to Disney World, but my husband and I are (anxious/eager) about the cost of the trip. Having heard on the morning news...
Feel Good? Feel Well?
When we’re feeling healthy and happy, should we say we feel good or we feel well? The short answer is that either is fine, but we need to take a deeper dive if we want to use good and well appropriately in other contexts, too. Many of us were taught the partial truth...
The Pronouns “They,” “Them,” and “Their” Are Sometimes Singular
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...