"Chicago stretches along the shore of Lake Michigan, which makes a beautiful shore drive possible." This sentence has a problem with pronoun-antecedent agreement: which is vague; its antecedent (the noun the pronoun stands for) is unclear. Today, we'll review some basics of pronoun-antecedent agreement and find out why agreement is so important.  Continue reading...

More than 30 years ago, when I was completing my undergraduate degree, I found myself in an "open-book" final exam. Talk about the magic of threes... I had to write three essays on three different books in three hours. As allowed, I had lugged into the exam an impossibly tall stack of books.  Continue reading...

Words have meaning, right? Sure they do, we all know that! We certainly use words, spoken or written, at all hours of the day and night to convey what we mean to other people. We know the meanings of many words, and if we don't know what a word means -- heterolysis, for instance -- we can look up its meaning in the dictionary: "the destruction of cells of one species by enzymes derived from cells of a different species."  Continue reading...

There's a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs don't escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone's-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.  Continue reading...

Merrill Perlman settles a dispute between a sportswriter and his editor about whether the word "fraught" needs to take a preposition.  Continue reading...

In a recent Slate article about the em dash, Noreen Malone demonstrates what overuse of the punctuation looks like. Her article is so overloaded with em dashes that the reader is left dizzy and confused. A paragraph would have done the trick in my mind, but the article certainly makes its point.  Continue reading...

Don't you love farce? My fault, I fear. I thought that you'd want what I want. Sorry, my dear. But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns.

OK, I've just broken my number 1 rule of writing by beginning with a direct quote.  Continue reading...