March 10, 2014

Literally

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It's everyone's favorite peeve: "literally" in sentences like "The town was brought literally to its knees." But is it wrong?

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March 3, 2014

Variant Spellings

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Sometimes there's more than one right way to spell a word. How do you know? And how do you know which spelling is better? The answers are in your dictionary.

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February 24, 2014

'Ly' Adverbs in Compound Modifiers

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One of the most common mistakes in hyphenation is also one of the easiest to avoid: Adverbs ending in "ly" shouldn't be hyphenated. Here's the full story.

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February 17, 2014

Business Speak

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Why is so much business writing so bad? I'm not sure. But yours doesn't have to be.

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February 10, 2014

Faulty Sentence Structure

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If your sentence isn't working, take a good, hard look at you subject and verb.

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February 3, 2014

Avoiding Sexist Pronouns

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There's no one way to avoid gender bias in your writing. A balanced approach that considers the reader -- all readers -- is usually the best course.

 

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January 27, 2014

Easily Confused Words

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The English language is loaded with words that are easily confused with each other. The only way to avoid errors is to know the pitfalls in advance.

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January 20, 2014

Revising for Conciseness

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Professional writing is efficient and free of unnecessary words and loose structures. Here's how to tighten up your prose.

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January 13, 2014

Mind Your P's and Q's -- Or Is It Ps and Qs?

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Sometimes an apostrophe is just what you need to make a letter or a set of initials into a plural. More often, though, no apostrophe is needed. Here's an overview.

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January 6, 2014

Exclamation point? That's so 1840.

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Perhaps more than any other punctuation mark, the exclamation point is slave to fashion.

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