In both cases, around should be about, which means concerning or with regard to. I don’t know when or why it happened, but people have started using around to...(Read More)
The Coast Guard cleared the beach because of a man-eating fish.
In that example, man-eating is an example of a compound modifier: two or more words that express a single concept to describe a noun, in this case fish.
Sometimes compound modifiers are hyphenated, and sometimes they’re not.
How to know?
The rule...(Read More)
One of the things I edit most are sentences that include lists of points. We cram in too many. Take, for example, this sentence from a fact sheet about a company’s expertise in data analytics for the commercial real estate industry:
Our engagements range from predicting tenant turnover, to demand...(Read More)
The Reserve Bank of Australia recently copped to printing 46 million new dollar bills with a typo. (The word responsibility, printed on the face of the bill, is missing its last i.)
Typos are one of many things you’re checking for when you proof your content. Here are some others:
Accurate...(Read More)
In this edition of Say It Better Say It Right, an executive of a major pharmacy chain describes the phenomenon of having treatment centers in drugstores.
(Read More)Only one of the following sentences is correct. Which one is it?
Because you say to whom, you might think the second sentence—the one with whomever—is the correct choice, but it’s not.
In...(Read More)
Here is a line of copy from a piece I was recently asked to edit: Make a list of the people who you will ask for help.
The who in the sentence should be whom: Make a list of the people whom you will ask for help.
The grammatical explanation for...(Read More)
This edition of Say It Better Say It Right comes from a news article about the fashion brand Kate Spade.
(Read More)Last month, Jeff Bezos got a lot of exposure for—among other things—his use of the term complexifier, a word that doesn’t appear in English language dictionaries. In his widely publicized blog post about not succumbing to blackmail, Mr. Bezos wrote that owning The Washington Post is a complexifier for...(Read More)
This installment of Say It Better, Say It Right comes from Jeff Bezos’s recent blog post on Medium, “No thank you, Mr. Pecker.”
(Read More)
