Search results for “OG”

A few of you were dismayed by our using gotten in our article The Lowdown on Different Than. We wrote: "In recent years we have debunked some of these baseless 'rules,' and gotten a lot of heat from frustrated readers." An exasperated gentleman from Australia was "shocked" by the appearance of "gotten," which he denounced ex cathedra as a …

Comparisons in language help us communicate imagery, opinions, proportions, and degrees of condition, excellence, or deficiency. They serve communication as versatile, colorful tools as long as they are clear and complete. If they are not clear or complete, they can quickly fog another's view of our thoughts. Such ambiguity will often result from an omission …

It has been a while since our last pronunciation column, so here's another group of familiar words whose traditional pronunciations may surprise you. (Note: capital letters denote a stressed syllable.) Antarctica  Like the elusive first r in February, the first c in this word is often carelessly dropped: it's ant-ARC-tica, not ant-AR-tica. Err  Since to err is to make an error, …

Last week we began our review of using pronouns that help guide rather than trip our written eloquence. We started with pronouns as clause subjects, for objects, before assertive or attributive expressions, and after than or as.  Today we’ll look at pronouns before a gerund, for an infinitive, and for complements of forms of the …

Many of us have been there before: We're writing or speaking with confidence in our content. For a secret second, we might even feel, well, educated. Then, unbeknownst to us, improper pronouns leak in and sabotage the impression we were making. Worse yet, we may not know how or why our eloquence tripped. Using the …

Less and fewer rank among the closest in meaning between two words, often leading to confusion about which to use in a sentence. They both refer to smaller sizes, amounts, or degrees of something. For example, you could say you are looking forward to fewer hot days in the fall and hoping for less snow …

Parallelism is the use of consistent grammatical structures in a series of two or more items to assist ease of reading and understanding. We touched briefly on this topic in Parallel Construction and Effective Writing. We’ll revisit it here with additional detail. Let’s start by considering the following sentences: In October, we plan to build …

Thank you to the many readers who commented thoughtfully on both How Did They Get in Here? (July 3, 2019) and How Can They Be Singular? (July 31, 2019). Today we'll wind up our discussion of the singular they, including modern arguments for its use. When we ran this series in 2015, we received little …

We as writers have probably all been stuck at some point: What do we say, and how do we say it? We do our best to form the thought or idea into words, but it seems like someone else can simply write it better. The temptation then starts to surface. No one will know if …

The title of our first article this month was How Did They Get In Here? That article looked at careless mismatches of the normally plural pronoun they with a singular antecedent. We suggested simple fixes. But there is more depth to this topic, and in today's article we'll explore the singular they a little further. In two weeks we'll wind up, at least …