For more on ALL RIGHT, ALL READY and ALL TOGETHER, see Grammar Girl. The slang term “alright” is always slang. Similar:Time’s Arrow, Part 1 (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 26) Data's head in a mine …Rewatching ST:TNG An archaeologist wh…CultureThe Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)As a grad student at the University of…
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The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left…
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We want to impress, so we say “utilize” instead of “use” or “orientate” instead of “orient.” We mispronounce, so we say, “nuke-u-lar” instead of “nuclear.” We make up a word, such as “notary republic,” instead of “notary public.” These nuances can be charming, irritating or, if we are fortunate, unnoticeable. But they can be costly…
Taking advantage of a summer day in the office to tweak one of the most popular pages on my website. Five of my pages account for more than half of the traffic on my whole site, so I’ve made it a summer project to give those pages some attention, to make them worth the visit.…
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Oxford University says, As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write ‘a, b and c’ not ‘a, b, and c’. But when a comma would assist in the meaning of the sentence or helps to resolve ambiguity, it can be used – especially where one of the items in the list…
But that’s not all. This vocative form has an extra flexibility that enables you to transform a word in another case into a vocative as well. Let’s take the example above, but change “Paris Hilton” into the vocative form: “@AlexisPetridis, I enjoyed your hilarious review of the @ParisHilton album.” Here, the original meaning is preserved,…
Students who are learning news writing for the first time sometimes overuse phrases like “so-and-so told reporters” or “when asked about X, so-and-so said…” Readers only encounter those phrases in journalism, so when students are new to news writing, they tend to reach for these phrases (and similar ones such as using “this reporter” as…
Everyone makes mistakes. As a student journalist, I completely muffed the last name of a faculty member I was assigned to interview. (A few years later, I found myself working a PR job, with that guy as my supervisor. It’s a small world.) So, with the full understanding that I am the pot calling the…
The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one…
If by “completes mission” you mean “makes us all sad by dying,” well, okay. It is not scientific or logical that I am sad because a cool little robot is dead on another planet, but it is human. This press release from NASA suggests that PR professionals are also apparently living on another planet, where…
That line sounds like the title of a great blues song. The second verse isn’t quite so poetic. “Tears in space don’t run down your face,” he said, according to lead spacewalk officer Allison Bollinger who described the problem Feustel encountered when out on the spacewalk with astronaut Mike Fincke. “They actually kind of conglomerate…
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The other day I was asked if a letter should read: “Staff members at the Local Planning Council, with whom we’ve worked for over ten years” or “Staff members at the Local Planning Council, which we have worked with for over ten years.” My response was something people don’t want to hear. I said that…
Sports journalism is full of colorful figures of speech, invented by writers who wanted to put a little variety into their writing. When given objective data about the game, a computer program has done a fairly good job of emulating sports lingo. The following story starts out by critiquing a sports news story that some…
Susan Jeffers had a job like that. She was the copy editor for a few books you may have heard of: “Order of the Phoenix,” “Half-Blood Prince,” and “Deathly Hallows.” Each title, in case you just got back from Mars, begins with the words “Harry Potter and the …” Pretty good gig, was it? “It…