Language is always changing to reflect material developments and changing ideas, so it’s important to frequently revisit and update use of words, expressions, and language structures that may convey meanings we don’t intend and that may alienate readers or listeners. In today’s post, I will discuss some more words and expressions you may want to leave out of your language due to their histories in racism or sexism.

Several phrases have been cancelled in recent years for good reasons, but there have been no good phrases to replace them. This gap in appropriate language can leave those who don't mean to offend scrambling. The sayings were just so darn useful.

We’re used to speaking and writing as individuals; writing from the whole family means navigating some quirks of grammar and spelling. But as the angels in the old Christmas carols like to say, fear not! Your friends at ProofreadingPal are here to help.

In today’s post, I’ll offer some tips for shorter internal office communications such as memos and bulletins for distribution electronically or in print and posted signs to convey specific information or instructions.

So there you are, editing away, and you see a quote with an error in it. Do you fix it, or not?

The curators of the standard have assigned keystroke shortcuts the diacritics, punctuation marks, and symbols most commonly used in English, allowing users to render them onscreen and in print while typing and without opening a separate application or subroutine.

A frequent complaint of language learners of English is that the pronunciation of a word is often quite unpredictable. For example, we have the words “might,” “right,” and “freight” with Gs and Hs with no apparent sound; “score,” “school,” and “skip,” but also “scissors”; and, of course, “bow” (and arrow) and “bow” (and show respect), and “row” (a boat) and “row” (with an enemy).

For this first post in the series, we’ll start with the most important aspect of good fictional magic I can think of: establishing its limitations.

The Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit based in Mountain View, California, was founded in 1991 to compile the various ad hoc systems used in different companies and locations and institute a truly global, cross-platform standard, meaning that a given code point will correspond with the same glyph in any application, search engine, or operating system.

In today’s post, I will focus on the needs of one of our large client groups: students. Specifically, I will  review some of the most common problems we proofreaders see in student papers.

The en dash is used mostly for number ranges (e.g., 1928–1972) and in some stylebooks to suggest a hierarchical or interactive relationship between two nouns (e.g., father–son relationship). Except when people use an en dash when they want to us an em dash, writers tend to use en dashes properly. It’s em dashes that get abused.

Let’s say you’re writing a paper about the history of the United Nations during the Cold War; there’s a single reference to the late secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld, and you need that diaresis over the o. It doesn’t make sense to add the name to AutoCorrect, because you anticipate never typing his name again after you finish this paper; heck, you’re never going to type it again after you finish this one sentence. What to do?

With any digital assignment, follow steps similar to those you would follow for a traditional assignment like a paper. Read the assignment carefully and make sure you understand it fully, plan your process, ensure your argument is solid, conduct thorough research, write the text of your video using appropriate language, revise and proofread, and document your sources.

Most new writers I’ve worked with share the crucial misconception that the way to write a novel is to create a movie in their head and then write out that movie.

A given word may or may not then “read” to the English-trained eye as foreign, based on habit, familiarity, and longstanding usage. But language is a matter not only of the eye, but also of the ear. That’s where diacritics come in.

This fall, many schools will be returning to in-person learning, but no matter what your or your child’s mode of learning will be, the pandemic and the virtual learning it required will have a tremendous effect on teaching and learning from now on.

Whether your first language is English or not, you must have mixed your metaphors a time or two. In conversation, it’s not a biggie. Everyone (unless they’re an editor with no social skills) pretends it didn’t matter, and life goes on. But in writing, these matter. They sit there and taunt the reader to notice something is wrong, and usually they succeed.

Foreign loan words are brought into English more or less intact, either in their original spelling (e.g., the German “schadenfreude,” the French “bistro”) or, if non-Western in origin, transliterated into the Latin alphabet (e.g., the Japanese “karaoke,” the Mandarin “kung fu”).

In Word, there are lots of little options and properties that dictate—and may unpredictably change—the positioning of an object. Understanding those, which I will discuss in this post, puts you in a much better place to avoid the rabbit hole of object placement issues.