Hello! I’m very grateful to Quy Ma at About Me Stories for inviting me to submit my bio to his terrific publication. As my subhead states above, I’m an author, editor, poet, and mom, and I’m also a total grammar geek and word nerd. I grew up in upstate New…
Most English speakers are familiar with the general idea of past, present, and future tenses. While the past tense is used to refer to something that occurred in the past, the present tense refers to something that’s occurring now (or a general statement of something that occurs on a regular…
In my Writing Well post “The Positive Effect of Appositives in Your Writing,” I reference a rule that can be helpful in multiple grammatical situations: “While extra info requires commas, essential info does not.” …
While many writers have heard the admonishment to never, ever split infinitives, most remain unsure whether this rule still applies — or why it ever existed. …
In my Writing Well post on conjunctions, I discussed how conjunctions are all about making connections. Same goes for conjunctive adverbs. To put it simply, a conjunctive adverb creates a connection between two independent clauses, groups of words that can stand on their own as complete sentences.
In my Writing Well post “Two Tricks to Help You Remember When to Insert a Comma Before ‘So,’” I mention that it’s important to understand how “so” is being used in the middle of a sentence before deciding whether a comma should precede it. …
In my last Writing Well post, I explored participles that express “an action or a state of being (as a verb does)” while modifying “a noun or pronoun (as an adjective does).” …
Maybe it’s the intimidating word “participle” that creates a block in my mind related to this particular grammatical term. No clues arise when I see the word “participle” or “participles.” …
I find it fascinating that the U.K. version of “breathing room” — which in the U.S. means room and time to think things over — is “breathing space.” According to the impressively titled Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, the term refers to “a period of rest in order to increase strength…
Similar to so many, my husband and I come from families of workers. Farmers and factory workers dot our family trees alongside many other union members as well as members of the military, small business owners, office workers, and more who plied (and currently ply) their trades day in and…
