Archive | September, 2016

Legal language

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 […]

‘One of’: the most common problems

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 […]

Welcome to English

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 […]