Participle.

It's one of those words your English teacher used once or twice but that didn't really stick with you. Yet improper use of a participle can cause your sentence to blur before your readers' eyes. In this Grammar Bite, we'll define participles and look at how things can go awry with them. Conquer the dangling participle, and your writing will smarten up right away.  Continue reading...

A newly published book, Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools, takes on a topic that has long confounded American schoolteachers: how should standard English be taught while respecting the diverse variants of English spoken by students? The authors, Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson, provide fresh insights into this question, providing practical solutions that teachers can apply in the classroom. We talked to Anne and Christine about what inspired them to write the book.  Continue reading...

My latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine explores a topic that any owner of smartphone knows too well: the often bizarre behavior of autocorrect, which can "miscorrect" what you type into unexpected and outrageous output.  Continue reading...

Once again the American Dialect Society has performed its not-so-solemn duty in anointing a Word of the Year (aka WOTY), and the 2010 winner is app, as in, "There's an app for that." I'm just back from Pittsburgh, where the ADS held its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and I've got the full report.  Continue reading...

To open a writing class at a recent conference of New York City high school newspaper kids, I wrote this sentence on the board:

The woman stood on the hillside and looked down at the valley below.

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There's an old saying in real estate: the three most important things about a property are location, location, location. This month in the Language Lounge we discover that the same holds true for English syntax. We take a look at what happens when elements of a sentence get accidentally waylaid.  Continue reading...