From Rick: I’ve previously talked about the evils of “as” clauses, and I lumped the overuse of present participles (“-ing” words) in with those. In my 3/22/2021 post I briefly touched on present participles as well and some issues with
Read moreFrom Rick: I don’t know about you, but as a writer and an editor, I’m constantly beset with problems when dealing with compound words: should it be one word, two words, or a hyphenated word? We all know that “bedroom”
Read moreFrom Rick: I’m finishing up this short series on prepositions before moving on to other topics. At the end, I’m going to highlight a common mistake of writing “use to” in place of “used to” as in “I used to
Read moreFrom Rick: I’m running a little late this week, but here’s the second part in the series on prepositions attached to various words. CENTER on, upon (not “around”) (v): [a primary issue] —The discussion centered on the critical issue of
Read moreFrom Rick: In this part of the Grammar and Style Tips series, I’m going to cover a list of words and associated prepositions that often give problems. The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) has a two-page section called “List of
Read moreFrom Rick: From the link below I copied what I felt were the most common mistakes that I see in writing and added notes and examples and the word “nock” to the list. The sentences I added show examples (preceded
Read moreFrom Rick: Scott and I have done a number of blogs in the past on words that writers commonly confuse or misuse. A few weeks ago, one of our blog readers sent me a link to a blog he’d done
Read moreFrom Rick: Last time we talked about the confusion arising from look-alike and sound-alike words in English, along with identical-appearing words whose meaning varies with their pronunciation. ENGLISH IS HARD–PART 1 This time, I’m going to talk about the pitfalls
Read moresubtitled with the quote by Dr. Smith in the original TV series Lost in Space: “Oh, the pain, the pain.” From Rick: In the past, we’ve done several posts on the topic of confusing words, and I frequently see other
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