A phrasal verb is one that’s followed by an adverb or a preposition, and together they behave as a semantic unit. (The adverb or preposition following the verb is called a particle.) A phrasal verb functions the same way as…

Recently, I wrote about the Royal Order of Adjectives. Not surprisingly, there’s also a Royal Order of Adverbs. When you write a sentence that has more than one adverb, there is a loose order in which you should arrange them:…

Writers like to sprinkle their work with subordinate clauses because they add variety to sentence structure. A reading diet too heavy with simple sentences or even compound sentences becomes wearisome quickly. Subordinate clauses—also known as dependent clauses—used skillfully can add…

If you have trouble choosing between imply and infer, you’re not alone. Many writers switch them even though they have distinct meanings. To imply is to suggest or express indirectly. To infer is to draw a conclusion. However, you’ll…

Writers tend to get confused about when to use bring and take. Many think that the two words can be used interchangeably, but they do have two distinctly different uses. Which one you use depends entirely on your perspective for…

Are you planning to go to a writers conference? Or is it a writers’ conference? Is the Saturday market in the town square a farmers market or a farmers’ market? This is a construction that often perplexes writers. The first…

Most writers know the difference between active and passive voice. In active voice, there’s a clearly identified agent performing an action: Tiger Woods made a hole in one. The subject of this sentence, Tiger Woods, is the agent who is…

You’ve heard of indefinite pronouns—pronouns that don’t refer to a specific thing, place, or person. Examples include everybody, anything, someone, another, something, and a few others. Did you know, however, that there’s another kind of indefinite pronoun called an expletive…

Have you ever wondered why we instinctively say “the shiny new red car” and not “the red new shiny car”? The reason is that there is a royal order for adjectives, and most native English speakers learn to use it…

Writers have three different dashes at their disposal: the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash. Most of us are familiar with hyphens and their uses. They’re used to form compound modifiers (such as in “a well-attended event”). We…

We writers often have to contend with compound words that begin their life as two words only to eventually morph into one. “Backyard” is a good example. It originally was two words, “back yard,” used to describe the area behind…

Most of us were taught to place a comma before a sentence-ending “too”: We’re going shopping, out to dinner, and then to a movie, too. But is that comma really necessary? “Too” in this context means “also,” but you’re not…