Grammar books, and hundreds of websites out there, are appallingly confused about statements, questions, orders, and exclamations. Most of the problem lies in their failure to distinguish syntax from ...

In a recent essay in The Guardian about whether America can ever recover from what happened after 9/11, the American feature writer Gary Younge says: An effective response to 9/11 that would have ...

Inversion is a sentence pattern that purposively disrupts the usual declarative form to achieve emphasis and better sentence transitions. It puts a prepositional phrase, adverbial phrase, adjectival ...

“There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough,” wrote William Zinsser in “On Writing Well.” It’s true that most sentences should be shorter. But ...