Having logged many years teaching English and theatre at New York City high schools, Shannon Reed now teaches freshman English Composition at the University of Pittsburgh. Here Shannon shows how teachers can work with students to improve their writing by focusing on five overused words.  Continue reading...

Poking around a mall with his sons, the linguist Neal Whitman came across a sign that said, "Violators will be trespassed." It turns out that the verb trespass has picked up a new meaning in the last twenty years or so, one which hasn't yet made it into any of the dictionaries.  Continue reading...

Of the many small errors that bedevil many writers — and enrage their teachers and editors — there is perhaps none so simple to understand, and explain, than the use of "it's" when "its" is meant.  Continue reading...

"Plus" is a positive workhorse of a word. It can be a preposition (two plus two), an adjective (a C-plus grade), or a noun (the good weather is a plus). Until recently, though, "plus" has mostly stayed out of the verb column. That's changing, on the evidence of some recent sightings.  Continue reading...

In my latest column for The Boston Globe, I observed that Beantown has more than its fair share of local terms for sketchy traffic maneuvers: the Boston left, the Boston bump, the Boston block, and so forth. But these regional labels can be found all over the country, and new ones keep cropping up.  Continue reading...

Jonathon Owen is a copy editor and student of linguistics who "holds the paradoxical view that it's possible to be a prescriptivist and descriptivist simultaneously." Here, he looks at how people can get tripped up on words with unusual plural forms like phenomena.  Continue reading...