In a different post, we discuss using singular personal pronouns to refer to singular indefinite pronouns (e.g., anyone, everyone, someone) and pointed out ways to do so without reinforcing the gender binary. This article focuses on making verbs agree with the...
One subscriber wrote to ask how to determine whether to use a or an in front of a noun. Like many of us, he had been taught simply to put a in front of consonants and an in front of vowels, but he realized that this oversimplified rule didn’t work in every case....
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...
This website addresses a number of confusing word pairs, including effect and affect, sit and set, and bad and badly, just to name a few. But none are more confusing than lie and lay. These verbs have traditionally held very different meanings. Simply put, to lie...
Elsewhere on this site, we talk about using I and me correctly. This article addresses the appropriate use of myself and other reflexive pronouns. It’s not uncommon to hear someone use myself as a subject in a sentence, such as in “Anna and myself are going home.”...
In another article, we address the problem that arises when people try to use apostrophes to make words (especially names) plural. Here we are dealing with words—both singular and plural—that actually do need to be possessive and thus need apostrophes: Where do they...
