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...
Before we can use the possessive case before a gerund, we first have to recognize whether we are dealing with a gerund (which functions like a noun) or a participle (which functions as an adjective). And therein lies the rub. Participles and gerunds look and sound the...
Those of us whose word-processing software includes a grammar checker have probably encountered the green squiggly line of doom wagging an accusatory finger at a passive verb. But what is the passive voice, and why is it considered undesirable? (If you learn better by...
In this article we examine four common verb errors. Can you spot the problem phrase in each of these sentences? We can’t hardly wait for the judge to hand down her decision about the case. I was suppose to finish the project on Friday, but I failed to make the...
If the dearth of apostrophes in text messages, emails, and social media posts is any indication, we may be witnessing their demise. But since such changes in usage happen slowly, for now we need to understand the difference between the possessive case and the...
