Our pronouns are sometimes vague, lonely and dangling because we fail to hinge them on a specific unmistakable antecedent. E.g. ‘Shade tells her sister that she is better at mathematics.’ Who does the ...

Have you made the mistake of mismatching pronouns? Almost everyone has. That includes the venerable and usually perfectly grammatical New York Times, most of your favorite writers–and me. I have a ...

I have a friend who regularly calls and, the moment I answer, bursts into a sentence like this: “So did you hear that they gave him the thing and after they did she saw it and said that they didn’t ...

Collective nouns such as "them" take the singular if they are acting as a unit and the plural if they are acting as individuals. Ex: The team (as individuals) decide today if they want to strike. The ...

On the morning of April 1, I heard a BBC newsreader say (without levity, April Fool’s Day though it was) that Sajid Javid, the British government’s secretary of state for business, innovation, and ...

Dogmatic opponents of using they with singular antecedents don’t argue for its wrongness; they simply assert. Rebecca Gowers, in her revised update of her great-grandfather’s classic usage book Plain ...

Do you struggle to correctly use pronouns? If so, you may understandably be wary of the ACT English section. This portion of the ACT contains 75 questions, which you must answer in 45 minutes. More ...

Two weeks ago, we started the series on word classes. And last week, we delved into report writing. I thought it would be useful to intersperse the series, so we go back to word classes this week. We ...