I noticed these headlines while perusing the Boston Globe app this morning. Do they seem a bit off to you? I’m an editor. My internal grammar checker is like an oenophile’s nose. And something here stinks. Does Senate candidate Joe Kennedy actually have a head inside of himself? Weird. Did he swallow it or did…
Today’s question is from an academic who’s being forced to use a colleague’s terrible materials in his course. I’ve got six ideas on how to fix the handiwork of Professor Writewrong. Can you do better? Here’s the note I got: Dear Dr. Wobs I’m a college professor and I like to think a decent writer….
Yvonne Mason, a former teacher, recently posted a picture of a letter she got from the president, with her corrections. This president prides himself on breaking senseless rules, including many grammar rules. It raises an interesting question: when is breaking rules an act of defiance that creates change, and when is it just laziness? Let’s…
A nasty, permanent spat burns in the heart of analysts of the English language. It’s the fight over the need for the Oxford or serial comma — for example, do you really need the final comma in the phrase “passive voice, weasel words, and jargon”? Now that a court in Maine has decided a case based on the…
In English, there are things you can count on . . . like the fact that “they” is plural. Except it isn’t always. Let me see if I can convince you. As my coauthors and I were writing The Mobile Mind Shift, one of them came up with this central definition: A mobile moment is a point…