What’s the deal with the Oxford Comma? When do I use a semicolon? Is there ever a reason to use a dash? We’ve taken a look at some of the most confusing punctuation topics in order to help you make sense of them. Read below for your guide to all …
Although he doesn’t have the same worldwide name recognition as William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer – who lived, approximately, from 1343 to 1400 – is sometimes known as the father of English literature. Widely considered the greatest English language poet of the Middle Ages, he authored The Canterbury Tales and a …
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 …
If you’re trying to win over your audience in any form of writing, you need to be as precise and convincing as possible. Fortunately, the English language has a huge range of words that convey meaning and elicit a strong response from the reader. But many people pack their dictionary …
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 …
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, …
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 …
