Our old friend John E. McIntyre, longtime copy editor for the Baltimore Sun, has some pointed words on the craft of writing.

If you rummage around the Internet with a search along the lines of "college students can't write," you'll find that the "why Johnny can't write" jeremiad has a long history.  Continue reading...

Stan Carey, one of our regular contributors, has a detailed post on his Sentence First blog about different from, than, and to. Though the than and to variants are often considered incorrect, Stan argues that these are simply dialectal differences. Read the whole thing here.

The prolific British language writer, David Crystal, has produced another winner: A Little Book of Language (now out in paperback), which Publishers Weekly calls "the perfect primer for anyone interested in the subject." In this excerpt, Crystal explains how language changes, from vocabulary to grammar.  Continue reading...

The other night I was sitting next to an Austrian teacher of English at a restaurant in Brighton, in southern England. He was a bit puzzled by an item on the menu which offered "Pan roasted local skate wing, crushed ratte potatoes, sautéed spinach, caper, lemon & parsley butter."  Continue reading...

Lisa McLendon, a copy editor for The Wichita Eagle who maintains the Grammar Monkeys blog, recently fielded a complaint from a reader about how the newspaper had used the verb "rise" in a headline. This led her down the path of documenting "nutty non-rules of grammar" that people often hold on to, despite appeals to common sense.  Continue reading...

In the past few months, Americans have probably heard more about collective bargaining than in the past few decades. I've heard and read the term collective bargaining so much recently that it has gotten me thinking about the strange nature of English gerunds.  Continue reading...