Write Better, Dammit!

Here are some lines from graduate student essays: 1.  When he laughed at my question, at first I was surprised, in all fou r years of my...

What do the two items in the title have in common? They both have hyphens.  That's probably all unless the self-flagellating monk was ...

My student began his essay with this:   "Nearing the end of summer vacation, it was the time when exchange students bid farewell to the...

A student stops a professor on the university campus. Student:  Hey, professor, where’s the library at? Professor:  Never, never,...

There are two ways to indicate a new paragraph: indent the first line of the paragraph by one-half inch do not indent, but leave extra s...

The full colon is a much abused couple of dots.  It is often omitted or misplaced.  I just ran across this sentence in my student's essa...

Suddenly, the semicolon is a very popular tattoo.   It is a sign that "the sentence is not  over yet" for people struggling with m...

The following rules come from  the  NASA Style Guide .    I find this style guide to have great tips.  I generally agree with everything th...

Conjunctions (and, but, as, or nor, yet) join things. Sometimes conjunctions join two complete sentences.  Each sentence has a subject a...

Students: Learn correct capitalization or you will be mistaken for a spammer. This email arrived recently: How many errors do you ...

Welcome to Canada.  Welcome to my class. You have likely been in many other classes up to now.  The classes that involved writing in Engl...

A sentence has a primary subject and a verb: Stephen Harper ( subject ) is ( verb ) our former prime minister. There might be other par...

Towards the end of the last century, one of my college students wrote, "I work with men, women, and truck drivers." I suggested...

It seems that the Harris Academy in Upper Norwood has banned some words.  Good for them.  I'd like to ban some words as well.  Here...

Last year, some students were rushed preparing their  Getting to  Yes  presentation.  It seems that one team member ended up doing all the...

Dear Students Before you read any further, make sure you understand the vocabulary of this blog.  Please review the parts of speech .  H...

In a  previous  blog, I wrote about the problem of using too many commas. Here's a sentence on the back cover of an edition of Rough...

If you are in graduate school, then you should be functioning at a graduate level. An article from the Royal Roads University website  at...

I just read this sentence in my graduate student's essay: " I was selected to work on a project for the open source software M...