Onomatopoeia

Students have a tough time with certain confusing words. We’ve looked at perplexing prefixes, and pesky parts of speech. In this final installment we will look at: Shades of Meaning Many words have similar meanings. To choose from some of…
We are looking at confusing words. Last time we covered those pesky prefixes. Let’s take a look at: Parts of Speech Many confusing words can be differentiated by examining their use in the sentence. When presented with a difficult choice…
All writers can point to a collection of words and phrases that they find confusing—and each individual writer’s list looks a little bit different. Isn’t there a simple way to keep all of those similar-but-different words straight? Let’s take a…
We’ve talked about when to use an em dash — and when not to. We’ve also looked at alternatives to using the em dash. Now it’s time to put it all together. Filling Your Toolbox As you can see, a…
Before we start exploring the toolbox, take another look at the possible uses for em dashes mentioned in the previous post. We will take each situation in turn and examine some of the other tools that might work in each…
The em dash has been around since the time of Gutenberg, but there is no doubt that its heyday has arrived. It reigns triumphant among punctuation marks, spattered prominently across books, web pages, and more. No one really knows what…
Fumblerules show rather than tell students what not to do. A common example of a fumblerule is the Plan Ahead poster where the d dangles off of the page because someone didn’t! William Safire was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, author, and…
In part one of this series, we introduced hyphenated compound adjectives, and discussed the historical use of hyphens, the dehyphenation trend, and general rules. In part two we covered the exceptions to the rules. In this last post in the…
In part one of this series, we introduced hyphenated compound adjectives, and discussed the historical use of hyphens, the dehyphenation trend, and general rules. Now we come to the exceptions to the rules. Every grammar book’s list of exceptions is…
Hyphenated compound adjectives? You’ve seen these; it’s exactly what the name says—a compound word with all of its constituent parts linked with hyphens to form a single adjective. For example, in the phrase a weak-legged chair, weak-legged is a hyphenated…