We’ve all been there. You’re about to use a word and you realize that it has a very similar sound/spelling/meaning to another word, and suddenly you are confused about which one is correct. These are commonly confused words for everyone. It’s easy to mistake some of these word pairs, especially …
France has influenced the world in a number of ways, from food and culture to architecture and style. There are also tons of words that we use every day that are actually French. Some french words are a bit more obvious, like bon appétit and chauffeur, but others you might …
English vocabulary has a variety of roots. Some words are from Germanic, some are from Latin (many by way of French), a few are from Greek. A few are loanwords from other languages. Partly because of this mongrel nature and because of the vicissitudes of history, there are no hard-and-fast …
In general, you form the past tense of an English verb by adding –ed (or just –d if the verb ends in e) and, in some cases, making minor spelling tweaks. Talk becomes talked, love becomes loved, hop becomes hopped and holp becomes helped. As anyone who knows even a bit of English is aware, …
Start Writing: Begin With First Drafts “I have rewritten – often several times – every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” – Vladimir Nabokov As any seventh-grader should be able to tell you, the first stage of the writing process is prewriting – planning out what …
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’re probably aware that using proper English is governed by rules and restrictions that are largely unconscious within the minds of native speakers. You probably realize that these rules do not completely overlap with the rules of “proper English”. Which are …
Plenty of books can give you advice about how to network, set goals, and manage your time. But to build up your core skills you should also check out some literary novels. While it may seem like curling up with a high-quality novel or sophisticated short story could only be …
Chances are you give little thought to the slash mark (/), but as it turns out, this little piece of punctuation has an interesting history. Origins of the Slash Mark The slash was invented, according to reporter Keith Houston, by a twelfth-century Italian scholar named Buoncampagno da Signa. He intended …
A misplaced modifier could cause readers to misunderstand your blog post, and a poorly-punctuated résumé could lose you a potential job interview, so it’s important to think about the relationship between what you write and what you mean, especially the grammar and wording. That said, minor linguistic errors or ambiguities …
While many people puzzle over whether to use that or which, the basic rule is pretty simple: use that when providing essential information and which when providing extra information. In order to implement this rule, you need to look beyond the specific sentence you’re writing and think about context. That …
