Whether you are writing a magazine article, a college essay or an email to a client, getting your text free of mistakes is essential. The spell checker helps, but it is far from foolproof. That is where proofreading comes in. Below you will find 8 tips and techniques to make your proofreading sessions more effective. … Read more
Some writers and speakers use the words glimpse and glance interchangeably, but there are differences. Glimpse comes from a word that meant “glimmer” or “sparkle.” As a noun, a glimpse is something that catches the eye: I caught a glimpse of her through the car window. As a verb, to glimpse is to see something … Read more
The English language is a thief. What we call English isn’t really English at all. Instead, it’s a collection of borrowings from other languages. Latin is the main one, but there’s also a good bit of French and a healthy serving of Spanish. There are thousands of Spanish loan words in English – some claim … Read more
Quotation marks are used to set off speech or quoted sentences and words. Despite its simple role, people tend to get confused about the position of other punctuation in relation to the quotation marks. Should it go inside or outside the quotation marks? It depends. If you are writing in American English, other punctuation should … Read more
Befuddle (bĭ-fŭd’l) is a verb that means to confuse or to perplex. It can also refer to confusion coming from alcoholic drinks. This week the befuddled looks of farmers as Mr Roh’s presidential cavalcade swept up the highway to Pyongyang suggested that Mr Kim had not let all his compatriots in on the historic moment, … Read more
A reader, responding to Case of the Missing “i”s: foliage, verbiage, miniature , asks reasonably: Can’t we change the spelling? Before the widespread use of dictionaries, the answer to this question would have been “Of course we can!” Not anymore. The free and easy use of personal spellings to convey the pronunciation of the word … Read more
Reading a blog post or a web article should be easy. Some web pages have large blocks of text with very few breaks between them. When I see those, my brain does the TMI (too much information) dance and my eyes move on until they find something easier to look at. When you try to … Read more
Felix asks, “I was just wondering when it was appropriate to use people as opposed to persons.” There is some confusion regarding the two terms, especially because their meaning and usage suffered a mutation along the centuries. Both derive from Latin, but from different words. Person derives from persona, which refers to an individual. People, … Read more
In the Fall, when television weather persons turn their thoughts to foliage, rhapsodizing about the beautiful orange and red and yellow leaves along the highways and streets, I cringe every time they pronounce the word as if it had only two syllables. The dictionaries I’ve consulted still list only one pronunciation for foliage: /foh lee … Read more