Blog Archives

Now, where did I put it? Misplaced modifiers and dangling participles

As a regular reader of this blog, we would like to offer you some really useful tips on structuring your sentences logically. Does anything grate as you read the above sentence? I hope so, because it should! It’s a classic

Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing

It all depends on the prepositions

The other morning on my way in to work I passed the van of a pharmacy whose slogan is ‘Dispensing quality’, and some linguistically minded prankster had inserted ‘with’ between the two words, showing what a difference one small preposition

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Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing, Vocabulary

Confusing commas

Here’s a quick question to exercise your brain: is the following statement true or false? Politicians, such as Donald Trump, are keen to dispense with conventional politics. Congratulations to those of you who said it was false. The above sentence

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Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing, Punctuation

Making words mean what you want

‘[…] There’s glory for you!’ [Humpty Dumpty said.] ‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’ ‘But “glory”

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Posted in Etymology, Grammar, Vocabulary

Defining things or adding information? – Correcting relative clauses

Everybody loves a quiz, don’t they? Well, if you do, read on. Relative clauses (sentence components starting with ‘who’, ‘which’, ‘that’, ‘whom’ or ‘whose’) are quite possibly one of the most confusing areas of English grammar. Just when you think

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Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing