Grammar articles
The possessive adjective in English must be the most difficult grammar to master. When is it a plain old adjective such as a car door? Or is that really a compound noun? When is it possessive as in a hair’s breadth? Is it a woman’s leg, or a woman leg? Or is it a chair’s…
How long can one sentence be? For some odd reason, I started searching for the longest sentence ever written in English and was amazed to find that in fact, a sentence of 469,375.2 words was actually written by Nigel Tomm in a book titled The Blah Story that had twenty-three different covers, which must surely be a…
Have fun with your words Writing always seems to be such a serious business. Novels, articles, technical documents, journalism plus one hundred other serious applications of this worthiest of arts. Being a pedantic member of the grammar police and spelling firing squad, I also take my métier very seriously. Paying strict attention to my use of each…
How do you use dialogue tags? Dialogue tags must be the most written about and discussed structure in a writer’s grammatical toolbox. One that I haven’t mentioned before as I didn’t want to join the long and probably never ending debate. However, after getting close to finishing reading the third Harry Potter book, (yes I…
Did you K-now that the silent K in words like K-nee and K-nickK-nack was actually pronounced in Old English. For some reason however, people could not get the K-nack of pronouncing the K as well as the N. So the K sound got K-nocked off. People got all K-notted up and tongue tied when they…
What Is Register? We can all recognise formal and informal texts, but you may not know that it has a name. It is called ‘Register’. The scales of register are generally classified as Formal, Neutral, Informal and Vulgar. In this sense, vulgar refers to childish or common utterances and not rude jokes. So, what is…
