I’ve had a few grammar questions recently, so I’m using today’s post to share my answers with you: Q.     Would you please help me understand an appropriate use of dashes in a sentence?A.     Use dashes to insert a separate but related thought in the middle or at the end of a sentence. For example: I [...]

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I had planned to post a follow-up to last week’s topic, but this sentence appeared in this morning’s paper, and I couldn’t resist! It came from a review of the movie, “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” — have a go at figuring it out: She’s Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace), the dragon inked girl of the [...]

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Yesterday I heard about a site that takes pieces of text and analyzes them for overused words, jargon and “gobbledygook”. It also gives the level of education someone would need to have in order to understand it. I thought I’d give it a try, so I took a paragraph from my service provider’s “getting started” [...]

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I had an interesting chat with my hairdresser yesterday after he told me about a conversation he had had with his twenty-year-old daughter. She apparently made the statement that “love has become devalued” today. Asked what she meant, she said, “Well think about it. We say we love our lovers, we love God, we love [...]

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What’s an oxymoron? It’s a phrase made up of two words that usually contradict each other but now form part of the same idea. Someone recently sent me these examples, and I want you to think about the meaning of each word and why the pairing is odd: clearly misunderstood exact estimate small crowd act [...]

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