Category: Grammar and Mechanics

Hyphens

Hyphens are used to combine two words into one, as in compound adjectives. Example: Not hyphenating compound adjectives is an all-too-common error. Here the words “all,” “too,” and “common” are working together to modify the...

Preposition Problems: Prepositions of Time

The three prepositions used to talk about time are “at,” “on,” and “in.”Remember that things happen at 10:00 in the morning on Tuesday in June in 2013, for example.

Homonyms

In 1968, a band known as The Yardbirds decided to change their name to Led Zeppelin and people have commented on the spelling of “Led” ever since. The problem was that the word “lead” (atomic element 82) and the word “lead” (the...

Em-Dash

The em-dash (which is different from a hyphen), ironically, has a hyphen in its name. Em-dashes are used in place of parentheses or as an alternative to a comma, semicolon, or colon. If that sounds confusing, that’s okay—you’re...

Where To Put Commas

Do you just scatter commas around, randomly? Or are there rules for using them? Find out – quickly!

Verb Usage: Subject-verb agreement

Subject-verb agreement can be an issue in any sentence in English. Verbs need to be conjugated to their nouns, and this can become more complicated when grammatical subjects become longer and more complicated. Additionally, some nouns can cause confusion about whether they are singular or plural.

Who/Whom

To Whom it May Concern, When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to refer to a person by way of an indefinite pronoun as the object of a verb or prepositional phrase, the correct pronoun to use is “whom.” For all...

Semicolons

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that writers should “not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” He might have been right. It seems...

How to Fix Comma Splices

You cannot link two independent clauses (which can stand on their own as sentences) with a comma. Fixing a splice is easy and these examples will show you the way.

Verb Usage: Present perfect progressive vs. present progressive

These two tenses have some overlap in use, but a difference in emphasis. Present perfect focuses on what has been completed, while present perfect progressive emphasizes that the action has not yet been completed.