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)
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)
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)
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 (and...(Read More)
Which of the following sentences features a word that’s being used incorrectly?
If you chose the second sentence, you chose correctly....(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 had ended...(Read More)
“They thought it was best to keep a lower profile and hone in on their specific policy areas.” That’s what Sarah Huckabee Sanders had to say this summer about Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s temporary retreat from the public eye.
A few days later, Ruth Bader Ginsberg reminisced about her...(Read More)
“You Can End a Sentence With a Preposition” will be sent to 500 subscribers from the list, “Professional Contacts for Weltchek Weekly”.
That’s the notice I recently received from MailChimp, the service that distributes this bulletin—but it’s incorrectly punctuated.
In American style, periods (and commas) always go inside the quotation...(Read More)
I’m pretty sure when I need a comma; I’m not so sure about a semicolon. That’s what Keith Hernandez told The New York Times about his struggles with punctuation.
The baseball star turned memoirist and social media maven is not alone. In my workshops, I often spend a lot of...(Read More)
