Have you landed on this page to “try to” improve your understanding of English grammar and usage—or to “try and” do so? Either way, you’ve come to the right place. The focus here is on whether “try to” and “try and” are both considered correct and are, thus,...
As spring graduation season wraps up here in the United States, now is a good time to talk about alumnus, alumni, alumna, and alumnae. Many of us struggle to remember which of these terms are masculine, which are feminine, which are singular, and which are plural. The...
The words home and hone sound so much alike that we can hardly blame people for confusing them and saying hone in on when they really mean home in on. Home In On Synonyms for the infinitive to home in on are to zero in on or to target. Think about a guided missile or...
When it comes to writing, less is often better. Writers can avail themselves of several strategies for more succinct writing, and avoiding nominalization—forming a noun from other parts of speech—is one of them. Nouns can be made from both verbs and adjectives, but...
My first exposure to the phrase “myth rules” was the use of that expression in Edgar H. Schuster’s 2003 book (which I highly recommend), Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writers through Innovative Grammar Instruction. But long before I discovered Schuster’s list of...
A faulty comparison is among a host of other issues that can affect the clarity of our writing: elsewhere in this archive, for example, we talk about avoiding vague pronoun references (in particular the vague which) and about using transitions effectively to improve...