Did you know that if a person has only two children, neither child should be described as the oldest or the youngest ? This usage mistake, which reveals a failure to understand the difference between comparative and superlative modifiers, is very common—and it’s...
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...
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...
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...
Precision in language is critical. If we misplace even a single word or phrase, we risk changing the meaning of our sentence significantly. Such is the case with the difference between the phrases “not all are” and “all are not.” Often we hear...
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...
