Archive | November, 2012

Comma knowledge

The comma, that curved little wisp of a punctuation mark, indicates a pause. It gives readers a chance to catch their breath as they navigate the ideas in a sentence. Commas also help shape sentences, defining which words go together. Commas tend to travel in pairs, especially in sentences containing nonessential clauses and appositives, nouns […]

Tense about tenses?

Just before Election Day, a student asked me why his Craft professor had made the following edit in one of his stories: “The turnout will be seriously affected,” said Russell C. Gallo, the Republican candidate in the 45th district for the State Assembly, who runs is running against veteran Democratic member of the New York […]

Singular or plural?

The most common way to form plurals in English is simply to add -s to a noun: one reporter, two reporters; one desk, two desks; one laptop, two laptops. So does that mean any noun that ends in -s is automatically plural? Not necessarily. Consider two fields that journalists cover regularly: politics and economics. There’s […]