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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 …

Language provides more than the means to express and deliver ideas and information. It also bears the power to please us through the tools we use to shape it. Thoughtful, eloquent communication can satisfy the outer and inner ear as much as awaken the mind. One technique that attracts us to writing and speech is …

Writing allows us extra room to infuse our expressions with an eloquence that would otherwise sound ill-suited when we're speaking. Where simple, declarative language often favors comfort and trust in conversation, techniques that are more affecting can infuse written language with style, voice, and even emotion when applied properly. One such structure is what is …

Many of us can agree that envy and jealousy are typically undesirable emotions: The words' mere utterance often indicates that something might be amiss. At the same time, some English speakers might sometimes mistake one word for the other or simply use them interchangeably. We'll explain their differences here. That way, none of us will …

We are familiar with numbers and the function they serve: We use and look at them just about every day. Recognizable enough in our checkbooks and calculators, numbers also have their own categories in writing. For example, the following sentences contain both ordinal and cardinal numbers: 1. Donetta took first place in the spelling bee. …

We write in order to inform, explain, express, persuade, and entertain. Through our proficiency with grammar and vocabulary, we enhance our ability to further develop interpersonal meaning and intelligence as well as the exchange of knowledge that shapes our perception of truth. Writing also lets us look further into the heart of human expression: to …

When we refer to case in English grammar, we indicate the form that a noun or pronoun takes according to its function in a sentence. The three cases in English are subjective, objective, and possessive. This review will center on the objective case. What Is the Objective Case? The objective case is the case we …

Many modern-day philosophers (along with thousands of social media influencers) will tell you to enjoy each day because you only live once. But what would happen, grammatically speaking, if you could have more than one life? How would you spell the plural of life correctly? In other words, is it correct to write lifes or …

We all at some point have addressed someone as Ms., Miss, or Mrs. We may also have a general idea about when to use these forms of address in American English, as well as to whom we should express them. At the same time, it's good to further understand the distinction among these references so …

We at times receive questions concerning the proper way to address outbound mail and, in particular, use zip codes. Because your goal and ours is to achieve precision in writing, we'll take a closer look at zip codes and how you can treat them in your correspondence. What Is a ZIP Code? Zip codes today …