Perhaps I am just getting old. Maybe it's the new normal to arrive twenty minutes late, to arrange a meeting so you can spend its duration broadcasting to the world where your physical but not mental presence is and to never snail mail.
For most people, it is difficult to know when and how to use "affect" and "effect." Their meanings and uses have stabilized in recent years, so let's sort this all out. It's really not all that difficult.
We need to stop abbreviating life, dump the clichés and expressions that have been abused ad nauseam. Here, 10 things that you should drop like its hot (including that annoying Yayyy!!!) in 2013. Are you like, ready?
Writing is difficult, especially under exam duress. So how do you make sure your final paper is as great as it can be when you only have two days to w...
My biggest reason for not being a grammar freak is that a grammar error has never really stopped me from understanding what's being said.
Once upon a time, I dated this guy. He was a complete douchebag. Oh, there were many signs in advance that he was scummy. He was very rarely available; seeing him was always on his terms; he never really wanted to commit, even after months of dating.
While this is not to say that the apostrophe should be renounced, there is plenty of evidence that it is on the way out. Like a lot of moderately successful devices, it continues to have fans - not least the people whose names contain apostrophes.
So, with an affectionate nod to Peeves the Poltergeist of Harry Potter, here are a few book-related pet peeves that aren't the authors' fault.
Further versus farther, compliment versus complement, affect versus effect -- the ever-complex, often-irregular English language is full of traps and ...
It's 4th of July weekend (pretty much) and we are thinking about the same things as you are: hotdogs, hamburgers, beach, pool, sun and, most of all, r...
According to the Associated Press Stylebook--Slate's bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related--there are two main prose uses--the abrupt ...
Many people think of language as a set of rules; break them, and you're Wrong. But that's not how language works. There are different degrees of wrongness, and there's not a bright line between the degrees.
We admit that grammar is not always simple. After all, there are some complicated rules in the English language. The following mistakes, however, ...
In honor of Valentine's Day, we searched for some love-themed grammar pet peeves. We are absolutely enamored, besotted, obsessed...uh, is it of, by ...
Literally means actually or without exaggeration. When you say "I literally...," it means you're describing something exactly as it happened......
The most famous mega-sentence in literature comes at the end of the book, not the beginning. Molly Bloom's monologue from "Ulysses" (1922) --36 pages ...
Although most likely better remembered for Snookie and Kanye's Tweets, 2010 also had its fair share of momentous grammar events. From misused to apost...
We've all griped about grammar before and our popular series of Grammar Pet Peeves slide shows has shown that Huff Post Books readers are a legion of ...
As writers, readers and all around bibliophiles, the HuffPost Books community, including us, can't get enough of the schadenfreude of grammar mistakes...
But how many people know that "hack" comes from Hackney in London, jeans from Genoa, or coach from the Hungarian city of Kocs?
Around 2,000 new words, phrases, and meanings have been added to the dictionary of American English, including bromance -- defined as "a close but non...
At one time in history, quotation marks served a single purpose: they were used for quoting people. But from my experience assembling both "The Book o...
But every once in a while, the people overseeing what you read change the rules, as the "Chicago Manual of Style" did recently when it released its 16...
Now I really hate to make such a big stink about a little squiggle. But sometimes a small thing like this can have much bigger ramifications.
Grammar pet peeves seem to get as big a rise out of the HuffPost community as the off the wall comments of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. We've collect...
