Perhaps you were taught in school that you should comma off the adverb “too”? So for you a sentence such as this is correct: I, too, will go there. Or even this: I will go there, too. Both are strictly incorrect but this is a solecism so often taught to children that many people don’t…

A question often posed by writers is “When should I use semicolons?” The short answer is, Never. Semicolons are most commonly used, wrongly, to introduce lists, definitions and explanations, where the writer should have used a colon. For example: There are two exceptions to the rule never to use a semicolon: one you must use…

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…

Why is “ahold” not like “akin”? Simple really. The prefix “a-” in English has a couple of major uses. One is that it is a negativising prefix, borrowed from the Greek. So “amoral” means “without morals”. Compare with “immoral”, which uses the Latin negativiser “in”, which assimilates to a succeeding consonant in English. The other…

I’m cheating a bit because this is more of a “how to write” than how not to but I think it just about fits. I’m going to share my method to fix two problems writers often have: loose structure and writing too much. I’m aiming this at assignment writing but the same principles actually apply…

3. Write tight Most of what I have to tell you is covered by this commandment. Be concise and avoid redundancy. As a writer, your task is to convey your meaning in as few words as possible. Less is most definitely more. Of course you already know that you should not write “in order to”…