We grammarians love to talk about the “rules” of grammar, as though grammar is something firm and unchanging. But the truth is, grammar—like the English language itself—is always evolving, and sometimes we have to adjust to a new way of…
Category: The Merry Grammarian
Rebecca Mahoney is an award-winning writer, book editor and freelance journalist from New Hampshire. As an editor and writing coach, she has a passion for helping aspiring writers improve their writing and achieve their publishing dreams. Her work has appeared in national magazines and newspapers, including the Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as in numerous literary journals. She loves to travel and her fiction often explores the relationship between women and place. She holds an MFA in Fiction and a BA in English/Journalism. Find out more about her at www.rebeccamahoney.com.
Staying Mindful of Initial –ING Verbs
As writers, we’re often taught to vary our sentence construction. Sentences that are always the same length, with the same general syntax, are boring. Good writing has a rhythm, and part of that rhythm comes from using a mix of…
Posted in The Merry Grammarian
Effect vs Affect
The email made me cringe: “It’s going to effect everything,” she wrote. Did you catch the error? It was the word “effect” – in this case, it should have been “affect.” Misusing “effect” and “affect” is one of the most…
Posted in The Merry Grammarian
Our Mission: To Boldly Explore Infinitives
If you’ve ever watched Star Trek, you’ve witnessed a controversy. No, I’m not talking about Captain Kirk’s excessively tight shirt, or the show’s moral and environmental subtext. I’m talking about a grammar controversy, and it happens right in the title…
Posted in The Merry Grammarian
Eliminating Expletives (the other kind)
Let’s talk about expletives, shall we? No, I’m not talking about thosekinds of expletives—I’m talking about expletives in grammar—specifically, a type of sentence structure called expletive construction. Expletive construction is when you start with a phrase that does not add…
Posted in The Merry Grammarian
