Category
A modifier that is not attached to the thing it is supposed to describe, so the sentence appears to say something the writer did not mean. Walking to the station, the rain started. Grammatically,
The general rule: capitalise a job title when it comes immediately before a person's name as part of that name, and lowercase it when it stands alone or follows the name. We met Chief Executive Amara
Three marks of different lengths doing three different jobs. Most writing uses only the first, which is why the others look unfamiliar. Hyphen ( - ) — the shortest, and the one on the keyboard. It
Lay needs an object — you lay something down. Lie does not — you lie down yourself. I lay the book on the table. (the book is the object) I lie on the sofa. (no object) That much is manageable. What
In the active voice, the subject does the action: the committee rejected the proposal. In the passive voice, the subject receives it: the proposal was rejected by the committee — or, with the actor
Three words that sound identical and mean entirely different things. Each has one job. Their is possessive. It shows something belongs to a group. Their car, their idea, their fault. There indicates
It is widely disliked, and it is not new. Literally has been used as an intensifier for emphasis since at least the eighteenth century, by writers generally considered careful ones. The objection is
Because English spelling was frozen in print at exactly the moment its pronunciation was changing fastest, and because the language has absorbed vocabulary from a dozen sources without regularising
A compliment is praise. A complement is something that completes or goes well with something else. They sound identical and differ by one letter, which is why the mistake is so common. She paid him a
A semicolon does two jobs, and both are worth knowing because it does them better than the alternatives. Joining two closely related complete sentences. Each side must be able to stand alone. The
e.g. introduces examples. i.e. restates or clarifies. They are not interchangeable, and mixing them changes the meaning of a sentence. They are abbreviations of Latin phrases. e.g. is exempli gratia,
In British English, practice is the noun and practise is the verb. In American English, practice covers both and practise is not used. She went to football practice. (noun) She needs to practise
The Oxford comma — also called the serial comma — is the one placed before and in a list of three or more items: red, white, and blue, rather than red, white and blue. It matters because it sometimes
Use fewer for things you can count individually, and less for quantities you measure as a mass. Fewer biscuits, less flour. Fewer people, less noise. The test is whether the noun has a sensible
No, and sometimes splitting it is the only way to say what you mean. To boldly go is not an error. An infinitive in English is two words — to go, to write — and splitting it means putting an adverb
No. It has never been a genuine rule of English, and following it rigidly produces worse sentences than breaking it. The prohibition can be traced to seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers,
Because it's is a contraction of it is or it has, and the apostrophe marks the missing letter — while its is a possessive pronoun, and possessive pronouns never take apostrophes. It's raining = it is
Who is the subject — the one doing something. Whom is the object — the one something is done to. The distinction is the same one that separates he from him, and that is also the most reliable way to
In the overwhelming majority of cases, affect is the verb and effect is the noun. Something affects you; the result is an effect. The delay affected our plans. The delay had an effect on our plans. A