Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is apostrophes. When I was in second grade, I lost a spelling bee because I misspelled the word its. I put an apostrophe in when I shouldn't have, and it was a very traumatic moment in my young life. So when listeners...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is the difference between abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms. It's kind of an extension of the last episode, because I want to clarify the difference between abbreviations and acronyms. Any shortened form of a w...
图片1 Photo courtesy of Laura Herman, Tampa, Florida Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is the word xeriscape. This is kind of a self-indulgent podcast for me. I've been house hunting lately, and I swear if one more real estate agent tells me about a...
Grammar Girl here. Today I'm going to play two listener comments that will lead us to a discussion of wordiness and idioms. Wordiness First, here's Tod in Canada from the todbits.com website: Can you help me correct people? Everyone that I know seems...
Grammar Girl here. Saturday is the Fourth of July, also known as the American holiday Independence Day. I'm American and I think it's fair to say we love the British now--we give British royalty a royal welcome when they visit America--but Saturday i...
Grammar Girl here. It was almost exactly a year ago when I did the first show about who versus whom. In that show I only covered the simple cases, and lately I've been getting questions that made me think I should delve deeper into the topic. So toda...
If you're confused about that versus which, don't feel bad. It's one of the most common topics people ask me about. I used to work as a technical writer, and I'd often edit documents in which people used the wrong word. More than once, I'd put in the...
Several listeners have written with questions on when to use the definite article the, the indefinite article a, or neither. For example, Tracy W. wrote, Which is correct: Thank you for taking time to review my application, or Thank you for taking th...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is the word that. When do you need it, and when can you leave it out? Also, I'll have an announcement at the end of this show about extra book giveaways and my book tour. Now, guest-writer Bonnie Trenga writes, Today...
Grammar Girl here. In today's episode, well talk about capitalizationits overuse and its misuse in the business world. Lets talk about why capitalization of some words is a capital idea, and why uppercasing other words could be considered a capital o...
Grammar Girl here. Last week we talked about capitalizing words in the business world. Today we're going to talk about capitalization in general. If you recall, in English, we capitalize proper nounswords that name a specific thing or person, words s...
Grammar Girl here. Todays topic is when a consonant is a vowel. When I was out on my book tour, someone at the Third Coast Coffee Roasting Company in Austin asked me whether the w is ever a vowel. I was stumped, but I promised to look into it. Guest-...
Grammar Girl here. Today's topic is double words, Guest-writer Bonnie Trenga writes, Todays todays podcast podcast is is about words that are doubled, such as had had and is is. Words grammar checker automatically alerts you when you repeat a word, b...
Grammar Girl here. Todays topic is when plurals have no singular. A listener named Brent called in with this question: I have a question: how come pants, trousers, slacks, corduroys are all plurals even though there is only one of them? Guest writer...
Todays topic is irregular plural nouns, odd nouns such as ox and oxen. Robbie from Keene, New Hampshire, called in with this question: One of my friends knows that I'm kind of geeky and into grammar and was asking me about adding the 's' onto words t...
