As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot - it's...
Grammar snobs are a distinct breed from their gentle cousins: word nerds and grammar geeks. The difference is bloodlust.
Feel free to use the following mnemonic device to help you remember: To lay is to get laid and laid. (This is meant in the stuffiest grammatical sense and in no way implies the kind of smut a Santa Mo...
You must now--before God, Jon Stewart, and whoever's sleeping next to you (even if these entities are one and the same)--make a solemn oath.
He needed to kill his darlings—Stephen King’s favorite term for letting go of stuff that just doesn’t work.
If you want to master the art of the sentence, you must first accept a somewhat unpleasant truth--something a lot of writers would rather deny: The Reader is king. You are his servant. You serve the R...
If Readers have prejudices, that's the writing world we live in. We must decide how to navigate it. We can't please all the Readers all the time and we shouldn't try. but we don't get to create our Re...
Is that a dangler in your memo or are you just glad to see me?
Rumor had it that Professor Jerkwad had a history of holding classes in bars and using the school's senior class as harvesting grounds for a long string of wives who never seemed to stay married to hi...
Amateur grammar snobs are a lot like amateur gynecologists—they’re everywhere, they’re all too eager to offer their services, and they’re anything but gentle.
I hope that, by this point, you're feeling a little less intimidated by the meanies, because I've got some bad news: Meanies come in many forms, not just human. They can be not only animal, but also m...
Amateur grammar snobs are a lot like amateur gynecologists--they're everywhere, they're all to eager to offer their services, and they're anything but gentle.
For Whom the Snob Trolls
This chapter is dedicated to those other delights of punctuation--exquisite little squiggles, those most delightful dots and dashes, and other tragically under-appreciated tiny tidbits!Nah. I'm just y...
Every long sentence can be broken up into shorter ones, and if you don’t know how—if you don’t see within your long sentences groupings of simple, clear ideas—it will show.