Don’t Misplace Your Modifiers

Modifiers – such as adjectives, adverbs, and descriptive phrases – should usually be next to the words that they describe. Especially when modifiers are more than one word long, people sometimes place them incorrectly. This can cause unintended meanings and even genuine confusion. Here’s how to get them out of …

Does Using Whom Imply Doom?

Before the Vikings dramatically changed English, using whom was a perfectly acceptable English. However, now that grammatical case has almost entirely disappeared from the language, using whom is a strange-sounding holdover that many people don’t quite know how to handle. The general rule is that whom is an object pronoun while …

Is It Okay to Use the Singular They?

What is the singular they? You may have learned in English classes that pronouns need to match the nouns they refer to. So, for instance, you use she to refer to an individual girl or woman, he to refer to an individual boy or man, and it to refer to …

5 Commonly Confused Words

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 …

4 Tips for English Spelling

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 …