Welcome to the J-school, new international students! (And everyone else.) As you start turning in assignments and, more traumatically, getting them back, you may be finding you don’t know English as well as you thought. This blog is here to help. English for Journalists was founded five years ago as an offshoot of my work […]
Carlos Serrano, asker of good questions, was reporting his first New York crime story in SoHo last week. His lede: On Wednesday at 1 p.m. police captured a man who allegedly stole in a shop in SoHo. The man was running on Prince Street near the subway stop when policemen started to run after him until […]
Along with “What is ‘it’?” and “Recorded announcement: In multi-sentence quotes, put the attribution after the first complete sentence,” one of my most frequent comments on student writing is “Needs a few words of ID.” (I should put those all on save-get keys.) When you’ve spent a lot of time and effort reporting a story, you […]
“What is the difference between ballot, vote and poll?” Carlos Serrano from Colombia e-mailed over the weekend in preparation for election night. “How should I use each of these words?” Great questions, Carlos, and thanks for asking. The seemingly endless presidential campaign of 2014, 2015 and 2016 finally ends tomorrow — we hope (cf. 2000). […]
“I knew a man with a wooden leg named Smith.” “What was the name of his other leg?” When I first saw “Mary Poppins” as a 9-year-old, those two lines struck me as nothing more than a silly joke, though they do turn out to be a plot point. When I saw it again in […]
Like other English words derived from the same Latin root, fragment has to do with breaking. Fracture, as a noun or verb,means break (a fractured skull); a fraction is a “broken” number, less than a whole; a fragile object is easily broken; diffract means to break apart or bend — for example, light. A fragment is a piece […]
No, this is not “a Really, Really Short Workout” like the one featured on the New York Times home page as I write (relief, perhaps, from the voluminous pre-debate coverage). This is one the simplest ways I know to make sentences shorter, tighter and faster: use possessives. A possessive is the form of a noun […]
The Chelsea bombing Saturday night is not just a textbook case of breaking-news reporting (and police work). It’s also a handy news peg — a compelling reason to do a particular story right now — for an explainer on basic legal terminology. First-semester students are already turning in stories involving the police, crime and the […]
Milana Vinn, a first-semester student from Russia, e-mailed to ask: “What is the correct grammar for this sentence? Syria is one of the countries that are in a war zone.” “That is absolutely CORRECT!” I wrote back, and thank you for asking. In subject/verb agreement (for a quick review, click here), one of the trickiest cases […]
In “Love in Translation,” in the Aug. 8 and 15 New Yorker, Lauren Collins wrote about learning to live in French after moving to Switzerland with her French husband. But she makes an astute observation about her native English: Grammar offers few clues as to the parts of speech that are not so much idioms as loose […]