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• The Difference Between “Discreet” and “Discrete”

  2570 readersBoth words derive from the same source, but have quite different meanings. Original Post: The Difference Between “Discreet” and “Discrete” Your eBook: Click here to download the Basic English Grammar ebook.

• Allusion vs. Illusion vs. Elusion

  5675 readersIt’s natural that many writers confuse the similar-looking, sound-alike terms allusion and illusion, as well as the rare elusion, and their verb forms: They’re all related. These words all stem from the Latin root word ludere, meaning “to play,” which also forms the basis for ludicrous. Meet the other members of this frolicsome family: Allusion: An allusion

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

  1671 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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  Happy Spring!

  4520 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

  1287 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

• 7 Common Homonymic Spelling Errors

  2011 readersHomonyms are words that sound like, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Some of the most commonly confused pairs of words are illustrated in the following examples. Original Post: 7 Common Homonymic Spelling Errors Your eBook: Click here to download the Basic English Grammar ebook.

• How To Make a Book Cover Optical Illusion

  3301 readersIn the three-minute video embedded above, you can learn how to build an optical illusion for your book cover or book poster. Cover designer Lauren Panepinto explained the process in this blog post as well. The project requires some editing tools, but ...

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

  1372 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

• Can’t help but be right

  4103 readersI hate when someone starts a monologue by needlessly invoking a dictionary definition for some word. Few openings can ruin a graduation speech faster than “Webster’s defines ‘scholarship’ as …”. (Even the Yahoo! Answers community knows this.) For most common words, the dictionary definition is just a simplified, neutered form of the

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  My Baby Is Not an It

  1374 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