Malcolm Gladwell’s MasterClass Review: Non-Fiction Writing
Would you like to learn to write great non-fiction – perhaps long-form articles or even full-length books? Then Malcolm Gladwell’s […]
7 Best Grammar Checker Apps
Do you struggle with spelling and grammar? Even if you’re a native English speaker, there might well be grammatical rules […]
Necromancy and Words for Divining the Future
In times of uncertainty, people wish for some magical means of foretelling the future. Considering that uncertainty is one of […]
Augur vs. Auger
Although they sound the same and are often misspelled one for the other, the words augur and auger are not […]
3 More Cases of Confusion Between a Thing and Its Name
One fairly infrequent but prominent error in sentence composition is the careless confusion of a word or a phrase with […]
Throughput, Exogenous, Titer, and Fomites
Media coverage of the coronavirus causing the disease COVID-19 has introduced numerous previously unfamiliar terms into daily usage. Four that […]
10 Pairs of Words with Dissolving Distinctions
Erosion of distinctions between senses for words with similar or related meanings is a natural process, but careful writers resist […]
Identifying Clauses
A reader has asked for help in distinguishing noun, adjective, and adverb clauses. First, what is a clause? A clause […]
Words from Greek “Theos”
Most people are acquainted with the word theology and its offshoots, theologian and theological. The words are formed from Greek […]
Bureaucrats and Politicians
A reader has asked for a discussion of the words, bureaucrats vs officials, and lawmakers vs politicians. [I’d] like to […]
Misbehaving Memes: thou, with, and went
Since Richard Dawkins coined the word in 1976, meme has become familiar to social media users as a captioned graphic […]
3 Sentences in Which Semicolons Are Superfluous
Many writers—even professional ones—are wary about employing semicolons, at best because the punctuation mark carries a hint of excessive formality […]