The managing editor couldn't have been any nastier. "We've had a bomb threat," he said in an email to the entire newsroom of about a hundred reporters, editors and photographers. "If you feel the need to leave, please inform your supervisor and your pay will be docked accordingly."  Continue reading...

Today, March 4th, is National Grammar Day. Someone who tweets under the name @DrGrammar just has to write about #NationalGrammarDay. So, in the spirit of the latest grammatical fad of starting every sentence with "so," here goes.  Continue reading...

If writing teachers have any absolutely verboten, don't-go-there, not-on-your-life, no-no rule, it is: "Avoid vague qualifiers!" Yet in recently re-reading The Bulwark, Theodore Dreiser's last and perhaps greatest novel, I began to see a value in vague qualifiers that I'd never seen before.  Continue reading...

We have weather "forecasts," budget "projections," attempts at earthquake "predictions." Most dictionaries say those are all synonyms for one another. So why doesn't the nightly weather report call them "predictions" or "projections"?  Continue reading...

Jan Schreiber, a noted poet, critic, and translator, writes: "It's an old phenomenon — reaching for the fancy word instead of the plain one, and coming up with a word whose meaning is not quite what the speaker intended. We often smile at those who, as H. W. Fowler memorably put it, 'go wordfowling with a blunderbuss.'"  Continue reading...

Adverbs end in -ly and modify verbs. At least, that's what we're taught in elementary school. It's a fair start, but we soon learn that adverbs are more complicated than the rule implies. For a start, adverbs can also modify adjectives, other adverbs, phrases, and clauses. And they don't have to end in -ly, either.  Continue reading...

I desperately wanted piano lessons as a child. Too bad for me my parents couldn't afford them. Instead, I watched enviously as my classmates carried their music books under their arms and marched off to meet their piano teachers. Why couldn't I do that?  Continue reading...