The other day I read an essay in the Washington Post in which a woman describes herself as having been “put through the ringer” with a difficult birth. I’m always surprised to find an error of this kind in a major publication because I imagine that their owners still employ copy readers. The idiom intended … Read more
A reader poses two grammar questions, one on linking verb agreement and one on pronoun case. Question One What is the rule that governs which linking verb to use when the subject is singular and the predicate is plural? The highlight for me ______ the poems that Mary wrote and read.” was or were? The … Read more
I suppose I may be exposing my own comprehension failings by writing about two verb uses that puzzled me recently. I’ll just have to take the chance. In a New York Times article (Jan 3, 2020) about the death of an Iranian military operative, I had to read the following sentence three times before I … Read more
The other day, I heard a celebrity say that someone was “as crazy as a bedbug.” I laughed, amused that the person had gone so far wrong with the idiom “crazy as a bessie bug.” As I usually do when struck by some linguistic oddity, I began searching for other examples. Imagine my surprise when … Read more
What is Creative Writing? Creative writing is anything where the purpose is to express thoughts, feelings and emotions rather than to simply convey information. I’ll be focusing on creative fiction in this post (mainly short stories and novels), but poetry, (auto)biography and creative non-fiction are all other forms of creative writing. Here’s a couple of … Read more