It’s quite common these days for people to get confused over the apostrophe in possessive constructions. I’ve worked with style guides, written by professional editors, that insist that “girls school” is correct in English. The notion is that it is an attributive construction, similar to “dog bowl” or “fish fry”, in which the type of…

Here is a clause that is meant to demand an Oxford comma: ” I want to eat eggs, toast and orange juice.” The reason is that pedants believe that this would mean you want toast soaked in orange juice in some way. But it doesn’t? Why? No, the answer is not simply that it is…

So there’s nothing I enjoy more than tackling pedants because English is a living, vibrant language and most of its speakers write it much more fluently than the pedants would have them believe. Today, I saw a common complaint about using “action” as a verb. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s fine and here’s…

Here is another change, or reform even, of English that we are living through. You are possibly not aware of it because it is a question of punctuation and who cares about that? I’m going to say from the start, this is something you cannot get wrong if you do it the old way. If…

Among the elementary advice you’d give to someone who wished to learn to write well would be to use the active voice and not the passive. The reason is that we process sentences “verb first”. In the sixties there was a conflict between those who believed that we actually formulate sentences by building out from…