Commas are tricky little devils. Anyone who wants to use them correctly will at some point encounter the terms essential and nonessential. The rule is that so-called essential elements should not be enclosed in commas. Conversely, nonessential elements require commas fore and aft. By “elements” we mean clauses, phrases, and even single words. Today we …

The noun person has two plurals: persons and people. Most people don’t use persons, but the sticklers say there are times when we should. “When we say persons,” says Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage, “we are thinking, or ought to be, of ones—individuals with identities; whereas when we say people we should mean a large …

• From a review of an exhibition: “The society had in their possession a card imprinted with a 1872 photograph.” Two booby prizes in one sentence: society is singular, so make it “had in its possession,” not “their.” As for “a 1872 photograph,” is that the way you would say it? The misguided decision not …

Have you ever needed a better word than the only one that comes to mind? Nowadays, the easy solution is to type that word plus “synonym” into your Google search box. Call me old-fashioned, but I turn to a book: the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. Anyone serious about writing needs this book—a quantum leap in …

Just about every week, GrammarBook.com receives emails like this: “My brilliant ninth-grade English teacher drilled into us that so-and-so, but now you say such-and-such.” The painful truth is that with each new generation the rules change. If you were in high school in the 1970s, it’s a safe bet that your brilliant English teacher lectured …

Almost a century ago, in 1916, the British author, editor, and literary critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) published On the Art of Writing. The book’s fifth chapter is titled “Interlude: On Jargon.” Quiller-Couch abhorred jargon, a catchall term for pompous, bloated, clumsy, hackneyed, or impenetrable writing. Quiller-Couch, who wrote under the pen name “Q,” extols …

In American English, most collective nouns take singular verbs—except when a sentence emphasizes the individuals in the group, not the group as a whole. In a sentence like The faculty is organized into eight departments, the collective noun faculty is singular. But consider The university’s faculty are renowned scholars in their own right. In that …

Let’s talk about nouns with split personalities. A collective noun (e.g., group, team, jury, flock, herd) is a paradox: singular in form (the team, a jury, one flock) but plural in meaning—who ever heard of a one-person group or a one-goat herd? Whenever we use a collective noun as a subject, we must decide whether …

Enough is enough. It’s time to blow the whistle on an obnoxious faux idiom that has the popular culture under its spell. The offending usage is based off and its alternate form, based off of. Both are everywhere. One hears and sees them constantly over the airwaves, in print, and online. A Google search yields …

Up until a few decades ago, writers had two choices: write in longhand or use a typewriter. Typewriters had one font. The characters were one size only. If you wanted to cut and paste, you needed scissors and adhesive tape. Writing in italics was all but impossible, except for professional printing companies. Thanks to today's …