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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
