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• Allude and Elude

  416 readersSpeakers and writers sometimes use the word "elude" when they mean "allude." Sometimes they use "allude' when they mean "refer." Your eBook: Click here to download the Basic English Grammar ebook.

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  O-R-E-L-S-E-C-K-S

  573 readersSo I don’t know whether any of you were following this story about a public school in California that tried to ban Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (my industry’s dictionary of record, by the way) after some fourth- and fifth-graders were caught looking up salacious words and phrases, but it has me in a fuming rage.What kind

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  Happy Spring!

  738 readersA sentence in my previous post sent me rushing to several different grammar resources for the correct capitalization rules. It’s a small point, but I often wonder about it, so I thought you might, too. Do you capitalize the names of the seasons? It turns out, according to the Oxford Dictionary, the AP Style book and

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  Funniest Grammar Links of 2009

  750 readersIt’s the end of a long holiday week. If you’re a writer who needed to reach sources for interviews – hope you had lots of fun with that. Some people actually did work this week, but many did not. It’s 20 degrees outside here in the Northeast, and even North Carolina got a smattering of snow

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  David Sedaris

  261 readers"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it."

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  ‘Your’ Grammar Matters When ‘You’re’ Writing

  619 readers// Nearly three decades later, I still remember one of my favorite lines from a popular television show. Rachel and Ross of Friends got into a fight and Ross screamed, “Oh, and by the way – Y-O-U-apostrophe-R-E is ‘you are.’ Y-O-U-R spells YOUR!” When someone irritates you, poor grammar can be the tipping point. So how can

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  Rock Around the Block Returns!

  587 readersimage sourceA while back I did a writing playlist - basically a list of tracks that helped my writer's block and got me in the creative mood. Some were upbeat, some were epic and inspirational, some just simply made me want to write. As music seems to be a big part of my writing routine,

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  My Baby Is Not an It

  698 readersSome grammar rules are just plain dumb. I’m the first to admit this. For instance, the use of “he” as the default singular pronoun (i.e., everyone should proofread his own work) is not only sexist, it’s a bit silly. That’s probably why the grammatically incorrect “they” and “their” has fallen into common usage as a gender-neutral

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  How to Make Your Boilerplate Sizzle

  1980 readers You know what a boilerplate is, right? It’s that one-paragraph, “About Us” chunk of copy you slap at the end of every press release you kick out the door. If you’re like most organizations, this paragraph often gets reused across all sorts of sales and marketing communications, which makes it the most important paragraph in your

• Three Alternatives?

  722 readersRecently my mother (British, somewhat pedantic) visited us, and I mentioned "three alternatives" in conversation. Your eBook: Click here to download the Basic English Grammar ebook.