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”).

I know, as an editor, I’m not supposed to say this, but when it comes to a language’s health, imposing grammatical rules isn’t nearly as important as staying relevant.

This quick guide to some of the most common, old-school, and occasionally forgotten abbreviations should help you stay on track.

In today’s post, I will write about a related topic: capitalization of medication names. The rule is simple, and it’s essentially the same as the rule for capitalizing diseases and most other things.

If you’ve ever been confused about how to capitalize disease names, read on. In today’s post, I’ll provide you with three simple, hopefully easy-to-remember, rules on the proper capitalization of disease names.

There are three articles: “a,” “an,” and “the.” All of them function as adjectives.

The English language is full of words that seem to perform the same function but have true differences when you need to be specific. In technical, instructive, and other forms of business or formal writing, “if” and “whether” serve different functions.

Ah, the double-edged sword of spell-check. That little red squiggle under misspelled words can be so helpful in drawing your attention to words in need of correction. But the absence of that little red squiggle can give a false sense of security, leading you to think your writing is spelling-error free when it might be filled with correctly-spelled incorrect words. One troublesome group of word is homophones.

“Parallelism” means the same parts of a sentence must be of the same type. But I’m not sure how helpful that is as a definition, so let’s take a slightly longer look through a few examples.

In this post we cover the apostrophe rules that are, for lack of a better word, downright wacky. If you’re going to be an expert, you’ll have to memorize these individually.

As an editor, I am naturally sensitive to language matters, and I took this criticism seriously. I’ve made an effort to modernize my pronoun usage, and in today’s blog I’ll provide tips to avoid gender bias in your pronoun use.

Lets get into the complexities of apostrophes when dealing with singular and plural nouns.

In research writing, the difference between hypothetical and factual statements is critical; your choice of verb helps make the distinction. In today’s post, I’ll provide a review of the forms and use of modal auxiliary verbs and conditional statements and some basic tips to help you use them effectively in research writing.

Even though the older generations love to dump on them and elites love to complain about them, emojis are a useful, necessary advancement in modern language.

As a living language, English is in a constant state of flux. This is quite clear when two words work their way into becoming one word. While there's no actual rule about this, there are some patterns.

You may never have heard the term subjunctive case before, or don’t remember it from Spanish class if you have, but knowing this rule and following it will make your speech and writing much better with just a little effort.

People seem to think it’s snooty to say, “Donna and I,” but when they grow up, they also become aware that “Me and Donna” is wrong. So, faced with the choice of “I” (snooty) and “me” (wrong), some opt for the worst choice of all: “myself.”

Dummy subject can add unnecessary fluff to a sentence, thus distracting readers from the point and muddling the writer’s meaning. They're easy to avoid.

I encounter incorrectly used words (and made up words) all the time, and today I’ll write about some I’ve noticed popping quite a bit recently, particularly in academic writing.