Jetshing's Blog

Q: When it comes to subject-verb concord, how do you teach collective nouns such as committee, family and government? The usual statement that they are singular when treated as a single unit and plural when their members are taken into consideration is practically of little value to learners of English. What one thinks is singular might be plural to another. And to make matters worse, there is allegedly a difference between AmE and BrE on this … Read entire article »

Fowler says: “”me” is technically wrong in “It wasn’t me” etc.;but the phrase being of its very nature colloquial, such a lapse is of no importance”. The rule for what he and others consider technically right is *not* (as is commonly misstated) that the nominative should *always* be used after “to be”. Rather, it is that “to be” should link two noun phrases of the same case, whether this be nominative or accusative: I believe that he is I. Who do you believe that he is? I believe him to be me. Whom do you believe him to be? According to the traditional grammar being used here, “to be” is not a transitive verb, but a *copulative* verb. When you say that A is B, you don’t imply that A, by being B, is … Read entire article »

1.Use a comma to separate the elements in a series (three or more things), including the last two. “He hit the ball, dropped the bat, and ran to first base.” You may have learned that the comma before the “and” is unnecessary, which is fine if you’re in control of things. However, there are situations in which, if you don’t use this comma (especially when the list is complex or lengthy), these last two items in the list will try to glom together (like macaroni and cheese). Using a comma between all the items in a series, including the last two, avoids this problem. This last comma??”the one between the word “and” and the preceding word??”is often called the serial comma or the Oxford comma. In newspaper writing, incidentally, you … Read entire article »

Can you tell which sentences correctly employ the hyphen? 1. The injured boy is five-years-of-age. 2. The five-year-old boy was injured. 3. The injured man is twenty-five years old. 4. I hope you can come up with an easy-to-remember rule to help me know when to use the hyphen. 5. I hope you can come up with a rule that is easy-to-remember. 6. The four-year-old ran to the bramble-covered fence rail, where she charmed a tough, too-tall-to-tango hombre. Hyphens are used correctly in sentences 2, 3, 4, and 6. The hyphens are unnecessary in sentence 1 because the phrase ‘five years of age’ is not being used as a single adjective. In sentence 2, however, the phrase ‘five-year-old’ is being used as a single descriptor for the noun ‘boy’. Not one of the words in that phrase would work … Read entire article »

The Need to Combine Sentences Sentences have to be combined to avoid the monotony that would surely result if all sentences were brief and of equal length. (If you haven’t already read them, see the sections on Avoiding Primer Style and Sentence Variety.) Part of the writer’s task is to employ whatever music is available to him or her in language, and part of language’s music lies within the rhythms of varied sentence length and structure. Even poets who write within the formal limits and sameness of an iambic pentameter beat will sometimes strike a chord against that beat and vary the structure of their clauses and sentence length, thus keeping the text alive and the reader awake. This section will explore some of the techniques we ordinary writers use to … Read entire article »

The following three titles contain capitalization errors. Can you spot them? 1. A New Approach to Marketing on The Internet 2. How To Promote Your Small Business In Five Easy Steps 3. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Titles But Were Afraid to Ask Follow these guidelines when deciding which words to capitalize in a title: unless they are the first or the last words in a title, do not capitalize –articles (a, an, the), –prepositions (regardless of their length), –coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet), and –the word “to” that marks infinitives (to walk, to run, to play, etc.). Sentence 1 is incorrect because the article the should not be capitalized. Notice that the prepositions to and on are correctly lowercased. In sentence 2, the infinitive marker to and the preposition in should not be … Read entire article »