Until recently, when middle and high school English teachers would ask me to recommend a good book for teaching grammar, I’d direct them to Constance Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in…

Our thanks to the readers, bloggers, marketers, and (on occasion) inmates who pass along news about innovations in the English language. Here are a few of the items that…

In his autobiography, British novelist William Somerset Maugham attributed his success to an ability to accept his inadequacies as a writer. Once he had done that, Maugham said, he…

Some of the most popular pages at About Grammar & Composition concern the figures of speech–described by Henry Peacham in 1577 as words “made new by Art, and removed from…

I’m afraid that the season of dubious annual honors is again upon us, and blogs will soon be clogged with top-ten lists of the best and worst of the year–movies,…

It’s time to pay another visit to the Grammar & Composition Forum–where readers post straightforward questions, and I provide the often baffling replies.

Play It As It Lays and Lies
Question:
I…

First and foremost, I hope and trust that each and every one of you shares my basic and fundamental belief that needlessly repetitive and redundant word pairs, in any shape…

Have you ever wondered how Barack Obama does it?

I mean, how the President-elect uses words, for the most part simple words, to stir a crowd the way he did in…

According to a report from BBC News, several local councils in Britain have discouraged their employees from using Latin words and abbreviations in official correspondence. Because Latin is no longer…

It may sound paradoxical, but a critical stage of the writing process is the period spent not writing: that wall-gazing, head-scratching, often nerve-rattling time devoted to discovering something to say…

“You keep using that word,” Inigo Montoya says to Vizzini in The Princess Bride. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The word that Vizzini so frequently…

A colleague’s recent post–Out With Apostrophes–provides the excuse to reprint an article that first appeared here in the spring of 2007. Since then, a London reader has created a website…

As Americans stagger toward Election Day, we’d like to offer an antidote to the incessant sound bites, robocalls, attack ads, and rhetorical flourishes. A corrective to the hype, hooey, and…

Today we continue our fall campaign to cut the clutter by looking at eight more common redundancies. The sentences in italics were found in newspapers, newsletters, advertisements, and blogs. The…

Writing about the golden age of sports reporting, baseball historian Harold Seymour illustrated the sort of colorful language that was in vogue at the end of the 19th century:

Teams…

Used thoughtfully, figures of speech can enrich and enliven our writing. But when laid on too thick, stretched beyond recognition, bent out of shape, or mixed like a Mai Tai…

Over the past year, readers have been contributing in earnest to our sizeable collection of annoying words and expressions. Recent additions include “automagically,” “conversate,” “manbag,” “hubby,” “basically,” “no problem,”…

This week we join Yale University in marking the 250th birthday of alumnus Noah Webster. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut on October 16, 1758, Webster is recognized today for his…

And now for something completely different, we call on those renowned rhetoricians John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and the unforgivably late Graham Chapman. Known to…

We continue our fall campaign to cut the clutter by honoring ten common words. Unfortunately, these words are so common that some writers try to avoid their company, favoring longer…

Have you ever tried to explain to a four-year-old child why two feet aren’t foots, or two mice aren’t mouses? Of course the appropriate grownup response to such questions is,…

…

Among the ancient textbooks that crowd my shelves (books, I’m told, that should have been ditched or donated long ago) is one by Evelyn May Albright that’s simply titled Descriptive…

Here, from our Glossary of Commonly Confused Words, are ten tricky word pairs that look and sound alike but have different meanings.

All Ready & Already
The phrase all ready means completely…

Today’s guest blogger is Brian O’Nolan, who from 1939 until his death in 1966 commanded a satiric weekly column for The Irish Times called “Cruiskeen Lawn.” Under the pen name…

“I don’t want to talk grammar,” Liza says in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. “I want to talk like a lady.”

Eliza Doolittle (you might know her from the musical version,…

We kick off our fall campaign to cut the clutter in our writing with these eight common redundancies:

Most problems are defused before they become an acute crisis.
Crisis means “a crucial…

I probably don’t have to tell you that September 24 is National Punctuation Day. For weeks we’ve been gathering dashes, calling up old commas, and hiding gaily wrapped colons where…

From The Economist to the Bangkok Post, last week’s most popular headline was “Nightmare on Wall Street.” Journalists talked of “carnage,” “panic,” and “doom.” A few even dared to whisper…

So there you are, crouched over the keyboard with a topic and a deadline–and not a blessed thought in your head. You’ve already raided the fridge, checked your email (twice),…

You don’t have to be a budding novelist to benefit from some of the advice offered by professional writers. Consider, for example, Ernest Hemingway’s famous iceberg theory of prose, which…

“Cut out all these exclamation points,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once advised a young author. “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

Since its first appearance in the latter…

Mudslinging and muckraking are nothing new in political campaigns. And for that matter neither are metaphors–metaphors like mudslinging and muckraking, for example.

In the U.S. presidential race, gibes about pork-barrel spending…

For this month’s edition of Language Facts and Figures, let’s pay another visit to the Grammar & Composition Forum. Here are just a few of the many good questions that…

After touring St. Paul’s Cathedral during a trip to London in 1872, Mark Twain jotted this fervent response in his notebook: “Expression–expression is the thing in art. I do not…

As you probably heard this past week–over and over again–Republican presidential candidate John McCain is a maverick. And guess what, so is his running mate–the “Alaska maverick,” Sarah Palin.

According to…

Imagine a spell checker smart enough to recognize and correct all the homophonous errors in this stanza from “Candidate for a Pullet Surprise”:

A checker is a bless sing,
It freeze yew…

After touring St. Paul’s Cathedral during a trip to London in 1872, Mark Twain jotted this response in his notebook:
Expression–expression is the thing in art. I do not care what…

Although you may not immediately recognize the name, odds are good that you have dipped into at least one of Laurence Urdang’s reference books. After all, before his death last…

Although you may not immediately recognize the name, odds are good that you have dipped into at least one of Laurence Urdang’s reference books. After all, before his death last…

It all started back in January with this cranky observation from James Thurber:

I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular…

After touring St. Paul’s Cathedral during a trip to London in 1872, Mark Twain jotted this response in his notebook:
Expression–expression is the thing in art. I do not care what…

If you’re in a mood to eavesdrop on some smart conversations about language, tune in to any of these fine programs on the BBC Radio 4 website. A word of…

Have you ever experienced textpectation? According to the Urban Dictionary, that’s “the anticipation one feels when waiting for a response to a text message.” To a linguist, textpectation is an…

Writing near the end of the 19th century, Matthew Arnold made it all sound pretty simple. “Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is…

Here’s a question you won’t find on either of the two most widely used college admissions tests:

What do the letters “SAT” and “ACT” stand for?

The answer, in each case, is…

Thirty years ago, two Canadian educators wrote a spirited, well-informed defense of the teaching of grammar. In “Twenty-one Kicks at the Grammar Horse,” Ian S. Fraser and Lynda M. Hodson…

For heaven’s sake, you’ve been taking courses in reading and writing since you were in first grade. And yet what’s the one class that almost every first-year student in every…

Thanks to a tip from the Polymath From Portsmouth, Lancelot Kirby, I just read a fascinating article by Kenneth Krause in the July/August 2008 issue of The Humanist: “Mapping Metaphor:…

The English language contains well over half-a-million words. More than a million, in fact, if you start counting proper names, abbreviations, and technical terms. Still, as shown by such recent…

Here are a few of the questions that have recently appeared in our Grammar & Composition Forum:

When writing a story do I write “OK” or “okay” or what? What if…

In a recent column by Boston Globe journalist Ellen Goodman, this odd-looking sentence caught my eye:

Let’s go back to a McCain op-ed that (BEG ITAL)did(END ITAL) run in The New…

According to a usage note in the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary, “But may be used to begin a sentence at all levels of style.” The same point…

Perhaps you remember this (slightly sanitized) linguistic exchange between Ray “Bones” Barboni (played by Dennis Farina) and Chili Palmer (John Travolta) in the movie Get Shorty (1995):

Barboni: Let me explain…

The owner of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., died in 1918, six years before his newspaper vanished in a merger with the New York Tribune. But in…

As language maven Richard Lederer has shown (or showed) in his poem “Tense Times With Verbs,” irregular verbs in English are delightfully unpredictable:
Today we speak, but first we spoke;
Some faucets…

For many of us, the hardest part of writing is getting started. Even after we exhaust our rituals of procrastination (checking email, playing FreeCell, resizing icons), there’s the
challenge of…

Homophones, as you probably know (not no), are words that are pronounced the same but differ in meaning and usually spelling. Understandably, they rank high on our list of Commonly…

Readers of classic mythology and modern science fantasy will be familiar with the concept of shapeshifting: changing from one form (say that of a human) to another (a frog, for…

Novelist Stephen King should know a thing or two about fear. “Good writing,” he says, “is often about letting go of fear and affectation. . . . Good writing is…

When it comes to descriptive writing, I’m a sucker for a good list (or series)–any playful hodgepodge of dizzying details that can stir a person or place to life through…

The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning-bug & the lightning.

Mark Twain’s well-known observation (offered in a letter…

When the sales team at Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary posts its annual list of “new” words, it’s easy to wax cynical. After all, a word usually has to ripen on the…

What is writing? Ask 20 writers and you’ll get 20 different answers. But on one point most seem to agree: writing is hard work.

“I think writing is really a process…

Clive Staples Lewis, author of The Screwtape Letters and The Chronicles of Narnia, was asked in an interview how a writer goes about “developing a style.” His reply:

The way for…

Most online reading is actually skimming and scanning. So to grab and hold our readers’ attention, we can’t afford to waste words. The trick to writing lean on our blogs…

What do you call a word that can convey opposite meanings depending on how it’s used? A word such as sanction, which can mean either “allow” or “prohibit.” Or screen,…

Rhetorician I.A. Richards (1893-1979) called them the most important words for two reasons:
They cover the ideas we can least avoid using, those which are concerned in all that…

Over 400 years ago, an English curate named Henry Peacham characterized the figures of speech as “wisdom speaking eloquently.” Through the play of language, he said, “the singular partes of…

Words fascinated George Carlin. From his early routine on “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” to the inventory of euphemisms in “Airline Announcements,” language–especially bent or abused language–was…

Over 400 years ago, an English curate named Henry Peacham characterized the figures of speech as “wisdom speaking eloquently.” Through the play of language, he said, “the singular partes of…

“A good writer is simply one who says all he wants to say, who says only what he means to say, and who says it exactly as he meant to…

For some years I have been confident that a revival of the study of English grammar was certain to come. There are two reasons for my confidence. The first is…

In these 10 articles, we turn to the pros for smart advice on how to improve our own prose.

Natalia Ginzburg: On Being a Great Small Writer
“I try to capture the…

In one respect, present participles are pretty simple, straightforward constructions. Whether laughing or crying, they’re formed by adding -ing to the base form of a verb. No exceptions. Present…

“When I say writing,” observed novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, “O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.” Indeed, says Joyce Carol Oates, “The pleasure is the…

If you’re a logophile (that is, a “lover of words”), you probably enjoy challenging–or annoying–your friends with frequent installments of the game “Did you know?” For example, did you know…

Our latest roundup of facts, figures, and wild hunches focuses on the preposition–one of the traditional parts of speech. Prepositions are members of a closed word class–which means that few…

Like most teachers of English, I’m not a big fan of standardized tests–those tiresome tools for school accountability that threaten to leave every child behind. What’s especially vexing is the…

I’ve mentioned before that my favorite chapter in John Trimble’s superb Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing (Prentice Hall, 2000) also happens to be the shortest. In…

While it’s not Sex in the City (thank goodness), the Scripps National Spelling Bee has been receiving a lot of media attention lately. On Friday, May 30, the semifinals will…

Writing in Britain’s Observer newspaper a few years back, Italian-born journalist Cristina Odone argued that America is “the land of the irony-free”:

Americans don’t like humble pie: they regard themselves–collectively…

On a BBC radio program in the late 1940s, philosopher Bertrand Russell playfully conjugated an “irregular verb” as “I am firm; you are obstinate; he is a pig-headed fool.”

What…

Sure, sometimes we write because we have to–those reports due at the office, the term papers due at school. But a lot of us also write because we want to….

Are you ready for a 60-second quiz on matters of style and usage? All right then, let’s go:

Is 25 grams a collective noun? 25 grams is consumed or 25…

Language lovers should be sending thank-you notes to Mark Davies, Professor of Corpus Linguistics at Brigham Young University. Dr. Davies is the creator of the new BYU Corpus of American…

“Style has got a bad name,” said British critic F. L. Lucas. Too often style is “associated with precious and superior persons who, like Oscar Wilde, spend a morning putting…

In his remarkable essay on the conjunction “AND” (Habitations of the Word, 1985), author William H. Gass describes the list (or series) as “one of the essential elements of a…

For many college students, the most welcoming spot on campus is the writing center–a place where trained tutors offer individual assistance on all aspects of the composing process. If you…

Our Glossary of Usage contains 70 sets of commonly confused words. Of course you know the difference between such similar-sounding words as affect and effect, conscience and conscious, lightening and…

“What most writers need,” said long-time New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross, “is not another writer but an editor–someone to talk to about their work, someone capable of giving guidance and…

With final exams approaching, a little exercise may be in order. Here at About Grammar & Composition, tucked away among the ads (also known as “sponsored links” and “offers”), you’ll…

If you’re reading this page, it’s a safe bet that you know English grammar. That is, you know how to put words together in a sensible order and add the…

Some refer to it as gobbledygook. Others call it gibberish, drivel, claptrap, nonsense, or mumbo jumbo. Almost a century ago, in his lecture series On the Art of Writing (reprinted…