Grammarundergroundfeed

The major publishing styles have changed a lot of rules, especially for punctuation. Prefixes are less likely to need hyphens, "etc." is no longer necessarily followed by a comma in book publishing, and more. The revised edition of

"My sister Jennifer" has a different meaning from "My sister, Jennifer." A comma tells the reader that the name "Jennifer" in no way narrows down who I mean by "my sister," so I must have only one sister. The absence of a comma tells the reader that the name is restrictive information necessary to know which sister I'm talking about. Here's the full explanation.

A friendly reminder: Don’t say “between you and I.” And don’t say “The boss wants to talk with Bob and I” or “Thanks for meeting with John and I.”

It’s me. Me, me, me. In all those sentences, “I” is a poor choice. Yes, you could argue that the “I” form is idiomatic. But why would you want to? You’re just inviting judgment. And because it’s just as easy to use “me,” ...

Some people will tell you that "only" can go only one place in a sentence: immediately next to the word it modifies, like "only one place" in this sentence. But in fact, "only" can work multiple places in the sentence, so I could have said: Some people will tell you that "only" can only go one place in a sentence. Moving "only" to before the word "can" is just as correct.

When it comes to grammar and word usage, English speakers can trust their gut. For example, if you know that “fewer” is usually better than “less” for countable things, you might nonetheless hesitate to say something like “I have one fewer dollar than I did yesterday.” “Fewer” just sounds worse than “less” here. That instinct is right: “less” is more correct to describe singu...