Research is a messy business. Even when the object of the research is as limited as looking for a car or renting a house, materials accumulate: newspaper and magazine clippings, brochures, envelopes and bits of paper with names, prices, phone numbers and dates of availability jotted on them. Keeping track of these materials can be … Read more
Over the past month we have been rolling out a new design on Daily Writing Tips. The goal was to make the layout cleaner and to optimize the visualization on mobile devices. Now you can visit our website with any smartphone, tablet or computer, and the layout will adapt itself automatically to your screen size … Read more
The first two words in the title, incite and incentive, have been in the language a long time: incite (1483) verb: to urge or spur on incentive (1475) noun: something that arouses feeling or incites to action. The verbs incent and incentivize are later arrivals that currently offend the sensibilities of many speakers: Some neologisms … Read more
When in a recent post I used the word insure in a context that had nothing to do with underwriting, more than one reader wrote to chide me for not using the word ensure. I’ll confess. The rule that insure must be used only in the context of indemnifying against loss is one that has … Read more
Clarity of expression is the writer’s goal, but what is clear to the writer may not always be clear to the reader. Ambiguity is the enemy of clarity. ambiguity (noun): the capability of being understood in two or more ways. ambiguous (adjective): admitting more than one possible interpretation. nuance (noun): a subtle or slight variation … Read more
A reader declares, One of the grammatical errors I’m seeing more and more is confusion between “confident” and “confidant(e)” Could you cover that? On the simplest level, several English adjectives that end in -ent are frequently misspelled with an -ant ending, for example: absorbent ambivalent antecedent imminent incumbent independent virulent Writers who misspell confident as … Read more