The Write Blog

This question came up during a round of in-house editing this week, so – of course –I wanted to share: Complete this sentence:  I spent hours  _______ over the pages of the magazine. A.)   poring B.)   pouring The correct answer is A, “poring.” “Pore” means to study or read something with great care.  You’d pore [...]

Some punctuation rules are pretty clear. You know that a period belongs at the end of a sentence. Quotation marks go around direct quotes. Exclamation points, in general, don’t belong anywhere in your copy. But hyphen rules are not so clear cut (or is it clear-cut?). It seems that everybody has their own in-house “rules” [...]

Photo by mag3737 When it comes to writing, there are dozens of rules just begging to be broken. Some are flexible and give you a little wiggle room — like hyphenation or deciding whether to use the comma before the “and” in lists. But there are other grammar rules that you just don’t break. You [...]

Hopefully you’ve already met the New Year refreshed and invigorated – and you’re still on top of those resolutions. I suggest adding another resolution to the list: No more absolutely embarrassing, lowest of the low, flat-out dumb grammatical mistakes. Grammar certainly isn’t for everyone (non-essential relative clauses? Gross.). But some rules – especially the most [...]