Author: GrammarBook.com

Many of you sent in comments on last week’s Year-End Quiz. The question receiving the most comments was: 7. James is trying to decide between three college majors; accounting, finance, or economics. Our point with this question was to demonstrate that the semicolon should instead be a colon. We didn’t anticipate the many comments exemplified …

To say goodbye to 2016 we have put together a comprehensive pop quiz based on the year’s GrammarBook.com grammar posts. The quiz comprises twenty-three sentences that may—or may not—need fixing plus two multiple-choice questions. Think you can fix the ones that need help? You’ll find our answers directly below the quiz. Each answer includes, for …

To support your effort to solve lie vs. lay once and for all, we have prepared the following table. You can bookmark this page and revisit it whenever you find yourself stuck on lie vs. lay. With repetition and time, you may find yourself advancing from a lie vs. lay trainee to a lie vs. …

As we enter the holiday season, we thought you'd enjoy one of Tom Stern's classic reviews of his Christmas catalogs. Have you noticed that Christmas is in the air? I started noticing in October, when I received my first Christmas catalog eleven days before the start of the World Series. New ones have been arriving …

Americans used to love their newspapers and magazines. Now a whole generation regards them as quaint curiosities. Here’s a day in the life of a late-twentieth-century big-city newspaper: “The newsroom was packed with reporters keeping very close watch on every institution in town. They had two reporters covering city hall, three reporters covering the police …

Our Virginia: Past and Present is a fourth-grade history textbook that was in wide use in Virginia’s schools until a few years ago. Then it was found to be rife with misspellings and blatant falsehoods, such as: The Confederacy consisted of twelve states (actually eleven). The United States entered World War I in 1916 (it …

Euphemisms put a happy face on the world’s brutishness. When a player is laid out by a ferocious hit in a football game, announcers downplay it with a cheerful “He really got his bell rung.” We had a Department of War from the eighteenth century until the late 1940s. Then it was renamed the Department …

Whether to use an additional s with singular possession can still be a source of heated debate. This review will help to resolve some of the questions surrounding that subject. Rule 1: Many common nouns end in the letter s (lens, cactus, bus, etc.). So do a lot of proper nouns (Mr. Jones, Texas, Christmas). …

To many Americans, big words are an affront. People who use fancy words are trying to show us up, flaunting their education and intelligence, rubbing our noses in our own shortcomings. It’s true there are people who use their vocabularies to intimidate. It’s a shabby tactic, and it’s sad how effective it can be. Many …

I am deeply saddened to inform you that Tom Stern died last week. He had recently been diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Our loyal readers will recognize Mr. Stern as the author of our weekly e-newsletter articles and as a co-author of The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation. He began writing monthly articles for us in …