April 14, 2014

Some Thoughts Regarding 'Vis-a-vis'

A lot of people use vis-a-vis to mean "regarding." But maybe it's best to not use it at all ...

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April 7, 2014

Attributive Nouns

When a noun like baseball or vacation works like an adjective, as in baseball player and vacation day, it becomes part of a class known as attributive nouns.

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March 31, 2014

Flesh Out and Flush Out

These two terms are worth keeping straight.

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March 23, 2014

'Actually' and Similar Adverbs

Some adverbs are filler you're better off without ...

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March 17, 2014

Apostrophe Traps

Sometimes it seems apostrophes are trying to trip you up. Here's what to watch out for.

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March 10, 2014

Literally

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

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

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

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

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

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