Respectively: Explained

The word “respectively” is extremely useful, but only if you use it correctly. It’s useless…

Grammatical Metaphor: A Quick Guide

Grammatical metaphor may seem complex, but it is actually something we use rather automatically and…

More Commonly Confused Words: Y and Wherefore

There are occasions when the living language is unsettled; no firm rule guides us, and…

Figurative Language: What It Is and When to Use It

igurative and literal speech, often confused, are important to understand, and both serve their purposes…

Making Good Friends with Irregular Words

Words derived from the same root might change their spellings when used as nouns or…

It’s a Modifier or a Hyphen, Not Both

Recently, I’ve been noticing an increase in the error of putting a hyphen between a…

Crafting Plurals for Surnames and Joint Possessives

We’re used to speaking and writing as individuals; writing from the whole family means navigating…

5 Student Writing Problems Found Everywhere

In today’s post, I will focus on the needs of one of our large client…

When and When Not to Use Em Dashes

The en dash is used mostly for number ranges (e.g., 1928–1972) and in some stylebooks…

Foreign Loan Words, Diacritics, and AutoCorrect

A given word may or may not then “read” to the English-trained eye as foreign,…

Tips to Avoid Mixed Metaphors

Whether your first language is English or not, you must have mixed your metaphors a…

Foreign Loan Words and Diacritical Marks

Foreign loan words are brought into English more or less intact, either in their original…

Adopting New Words vs. Slang

I know, as an editor, I’m not supposed to say this, but when it comes…

Quick Guide to Common Old-School Abbreviations

This quick guide to some of the most common, old-school, and occasionally forgotten abbreviations should…

How to Capitalize Medicine

In today’s post, I will write about a related topic: capitalization of medication names. The…

How to Capitalize Disease Names

If you’ve ever been confused about how to capitalize disease names, read on. In today’s…

An Easy Guide to Articles: A, An, and The

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

Simple Guide to Using “If” or “Whether”

The English language is full of words that seem to perform the same function but…

Commonly Confused Homophones

Ah, the double-edged sword of spell-check. That little red squiggle under misspelled words can be…

Bad Parallelism, Good Parallelism

“Parallelism” means the same parts of a sentence must be of the same type. But…