Blog

I am sitting here working on a seminar for next week and watching the hockey game. Aha! A grammar problem: ...These teams are so evenly matched. There have been 100 faceoffs; both teams have won 5...

Remember that the word but has to connect two grammatically equal elements. That means that this statement cannot possibly be correct: ...I can't help but think he is going with us... This is jus...

An interesting question was asked over on FB this mornng. I am stealing a bit from Jim Barker's forum. ..."Are you dating someone?" asked Scott casually. ..."Ashley was absolutely not involved," s...

It is not my intention here to deal in any way with "editing" the transcript or changing/not changing anything. In formal English, it in incorrect to add the ordinal to the date that immediately f...

When this question was first posted on FB, there was a lot of adjective/adverb conversation about the word "bodily." An adjective answers "Which one?" or "What?" about the noun or pronoun it modif...

A "predicate nominative" is a noun or pronoun that follows a condition verb and renames the subject. ...My mom is an engineer... ...Her name is the same as mine... ...She became a lawyer... Somet...

The punctuation of these words occasioned a rather heated discussion on FB that contained a number of misconceptions about the language in general. First, a note about the "-ly" issue. Adverbs th...

Sometimes attorneys use a clause that starts with if as if it were a complete sentence. ...If you would turn to the second page... ...If you would take a look at this document... This is just "ba...

Whether you want the dash inside or outside quotation marks when there is an interruption is really a matter of personal preference. When the quote is interrupted, you might decide to put the dash...