A lot of adults gave up on grammar long ago. They didn’t learn as much as they would have liked in school. Now there’s too much too learn. Amid a sea of gibberish about sentence-ending prepositions, ...

I want to follow up on the topic of language evolution that I took up in my previous newsletter about how the word “satisfying” has taken on a new meaning among many of today’s kids. The bigger theme ...

Now that I have your attention, I’d like to talk about dangling participles. This most famous of danglers is must-know stuff for any self-respecting smarty-pants. Not because the concept will help ...

To a linguist, there is so much to appreciate in just about every word. And over the past couple of weeks, I have been delighting in none other than the word “blink.” This delight was inspired by ...

Foundation students should be able to recognize the present participle but do not need to be able to use it. Higher students should be able to both understand it and put it into practice.

Okay, now we're going to tackle the dangling participle. A participle is the form of the verb that has ing on the end of it. And when you begin a sentence with a participle, that phrase has to modify ...