A lot of adults gave up on grammar long ago. They didn’t learn as much as they would have liked in school. Now there’s too much too learn. Amid a sea of gibberish about sentence-ending prepositions, ...

I’m a little fussy about past participles. Unjustifiably fussy. It may have to do with the fact that I married someone from small-town Massachusetts, where everything is “I have ate this” and “I ...

Last week we talked about how to look up past participles in your dictionary. Here's a condensed lesson: For any irregular verb, the past tense and past participle are listed right after the entry ...

READING THIS sentence, it may occur to you that something is slightly awry with it. Or you may not notice anything wrong at all. The first three words are a “dangling modifier”. This writing fault has ...

I want to follow up on the topic of language evolution that I took up in my previous newsletter about how the word “satisfying” has taken on a new meaning among many of today’s kids. The bigger theme ...