I’m recognized as a collaborative and “hands-on” advisor to my clients.
“Why the quotation marks?” I asked as I read this line in a LinkedIn bio.
The author’s not using hands-on in an ironic, sarcastic or skeptical sense, which is one reason you use quotation marks. Hands-on isn’t a slang,... (Read More)
I recently read a bio that ended with the following line: He was also a contestant on the college edition of “Jeopardy!”.
I loved that quirky detail, but I wondered about the period at the end of the sentence.
You don’t need it. The exclamation point in the quoted... (Read More)
In both cases, summer... (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... (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:
... (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 him.
... (Read More)Here are three examples of incorrect colon use that have crossed my desk recently. Here’s why the colons are wrong and how to fix them:
The ads were designed to test the impact of appealing to different emotions, including: fear, joy, and hope.
While colons are used to introduce lists... (Read More)
Which of the following sentences features a word that’s being used incorrectly?
If you chose the... (Read More)
I’ve written many bulletins about dashes—America’s favorite punctuation mark—but today’s edition focuses on the overlap between a pair of dashes (like the ones I just used), commas, and parentheses. All three punctuation marks can be used to give readers extra information.
Let’s take that opening sentence. I could replace the... (Read More)
“Why do you want to quit smoking?” the interviewer asked two groups of people.
“I want to breathe more easily in the morning …”
“I don’t want other people knowing I smoke…”
These two answers appeared in a research report I recently edited, but I wasn’t sure why the author... (Read More)
