Grammar Girl here. In todays episode were going to answer some bizarre and puzzling questions: Can two people share a life? Can two writers share a neck? How many heads does a person have? How many wives do certain men have? Today's guest-writer, Bon...
April is National Poetry Month in the United States, so today we're going to ponder poetic license. What is Poetic License When describing writing, you say people are taking poetic license when they use language in a way that isn't normal or correct....
Grammar Girl here. Everyone else seems to be announcing a word of the year, so I've decided to name a pet peeve of the year. After a non-scientific study of the messages I get from listeners, I've determined the pet peeve of 2008 is the phrase went m...
Grammar Girl here. Today guest-writer Bonnie Trenga will help us talk about tricky sentences that make you question whether you should use a singular or plural verb. Today were talking about a tricky kind of sentence that causes you to make a mistake...
Grammar Girl here. The grammar authorities are going to battle it out today. For they all have a different opinion about our topics: the merits of using the word for to mean because, and whether its OK to start a sentence with the word for. Now, gues...
Grammar Girl here. About a month ago I answered a bunch of short listener questions, and I promised I'd answer a few more short ones soon. Well, today's the day! Use to Versus Used to Hi, Grammar Girl. This is Barrett in Nantucket on Nantucket Island...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is the the, not as in the British '80s band, but as in what to do when a sentence calls for a the in front of a name or title that starts with a the, like The New York Times. So, listener Rob Jones asked, Do I have to...
Grammar Girl here. Today's show is still work-safe and family-friendly, but we're going to talk about how to deal with swearing in novels, quotations, and other types of text. My friend Scott Sigler and I were talking about his new book, The Rookie,...
[Note: I originally covered this topic September 16, 2006. The transcript you see now on the page is a new version that was updated March 5, 2009. Some of the reader comments at the bottom relate to the earlier version.] Grammar Girl here. Today's to...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is subject-verb agreement, and I'm doing something a little different. This week I have a guest writer for the show, my long-time copy editor Bonnie Trenga, the author of The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier. Oh...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is how to use the word however in a sentence. It's probably more complicated than you think it is. The question I get asked most frequently about however is whether it is OK to use however at the beginning of a senten...
Todays episode concerns a what-you-may-have-been-wondering-about topic. That sure was a mouthful, and it illustrates the problem of stacked modifiers, which occurs when you string together too many words to describe a noun at the end of the mouthful....
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is how a verb and an adverb messed up the inauguration. I took a break from work Tuesday to watch Barack Obama's inauguration, and like millions of other people, I saw a bit of confusion between Chief Justice John Rob...
by Mignon Fogarty Today, I'm gonna get crazy. I said that if people wrote reviews at iTunes, I would split infinitives, and you wrote a lot of reviews. So, to say thank you, I'm going to purposefully split as many infinitives as I can! My secret, tho...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is sit versus set. When I did a show about lay versus lie many months ago, listeners wrote in asking me to do a follow up show on sit versus set because the problem with sit and set is similar to the problem with lay...
