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
Read More************************* If you haven’t bought our punctuation book yet, what are you waiting for? We guarantee it’s well worth it. We promise that you’ll be surprised at the amount of practical information in it, some of which you will not
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