Year: 2009

Here are a few captivating opening paragraphs or sentences from various novels. Non-fiction too reads all the better for an…

Consider the following overloaded sentence from a newspaper. Professional  journalists, no matter how hurried, really should do better than this:…

Repeating a word or phrase can have positive advantages, alongside the negative virtue of averting confusion. It  can serve to…

“We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex…

The dash has only one major use: To use in pairs to separate a strong interruption from the rest of…

There are two uses of square brackets (which, confusingly, Americans call simply brackets): to set off an interruption within a…

There is one major use of brackets (or round brackets, as they are often called, or parentheses, as they are…

There is only one use of quotation marks (or quotes, speech marks, or inverted commas, as they are often called):…