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We’ve collected the best resources to help you perfectly understand academic writing features and functions.
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How Kurt Vonnegut taught one writer to hate the semicolon; how William James convinced him to love it.
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In this section, you will find many instructional materials we've developed for our Writing Center teaching.
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Answers the kinds of questions that University of Toronto students ask about their written assignments.
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A free, public-access handbook designed & maintained by University of Richmond students & faculty.
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Amherst College's curated directory of web pages for explaining writing skills and practices.
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A place for you to practice your writing and share the joys and pains of learning the language.
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Where the acclaimed writer shares his views on grammar and explains why discovering great literature is like losing one's virginity.
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For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still h ...
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Because sometimes periods, commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, brackets, parentheses, braces, and ellipses won't do.
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Where have you been all my life, the Interrobang? Less so, the Asterism, despite the awesome name. How many of these did you know...
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Stan Carey : 'Because' has become a preposition, because grammar."
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Using prepositional phrases to write a poem is fairly simple. First, let's discuss what a prepositional phrase is. Prepositions are words used before nouns to form a phrase that modifies another...
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Can an adjective be used where an adverb normally goes?
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"I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing."
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They often seem disreputable, like sullen idlers loitering in a public thoroughfare, but they actually do a lot of hard work and are usually persnickety about
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WIRED didn't check the syntactic contexts, they just counted word-form tokens!
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In the controversy over Grantland contributor Caleb Hannan’s outing of transgender golf-putter inventor Essay Anne Vanderbilt, who committed suicide while the story was being reported, Hannan was also criticized for referring to Vanderbilt as "he" rather than "she" in a passage about her previous identity as Stephen Krol. As Grantland editor-in-chief Bill Simmons wrote in his apology, "Our lack of...
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Whom, i am thrilled to inform you, is dying. But its death, I am less thrilled to inform you, has been slow.
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Rebecca Gowers: "He" as a catch-all term for "he or she" is an annoying bug of the English language – but Ernest Gowers, my linguist great-grandfather, used it happily
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In the object-omission class, the object of the transitive use does not appear, but the subject is retained: Compare The children were eating cake with The children were eating.
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*The meaning of words inevitably and perennially change.
The incident reminded me of one of the worst features of the grammar advice so many university writing instructors hand out to students.
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Maybe the quirkiest is the insistence on got as the past participle of get—that is, to write had got instead of had gotten to mean “become” or “obtained” or any of the numerous other senses of get.
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What should you say if someone tells you "shall is a perfectly good word?" Always agree with them because they're correct! But in your next breath, be sure to say "yes, shall is a perfectly good word, but it's not a perfectly good word of obligation."
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You shudder at a split infinitive, know when to use "that" or "which" and would never confuse "less" with "fewer"– but are these rules always right, elegant or sensible, asks linguist Steven Pinker
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David Marsh set out to master perfect grammatical English – but discovered that "correct" isn't always best
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From Spinal Tap to Star Wars, the best stories live or die by humour, says novelist and screenwriter Steve Worland
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Susan Butler has been behind The Macquarie since its first edition in 1981. We asked her for 15 of her favourite words.
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The Internet has no place for your grandmother’s commonsense communication aphorisms. That old standby “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” for instance, is laughably anachronistic online, where opinions need not be well thought out, facts don’t need to be checked, and rage needn’t be reined in. Considering this reality, it might be useful to coronate an expression that be...
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If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it […]
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Since at least the time of Greek philosophers, many writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing.
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British and American spelling - Language reference content from Oxford. Help with language usage, grammar questions, punctuation, spelling, and language learning.
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