by Cherie Tucker
May 2016
I got a call last week asking if there might be a word to use that allows you to avoid using the “he/she” business with nouns that are singular but stand for a group. Sadly there isn’t such a word, but there is a way out.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
April 2016
Anyone who was taught by the nuns knew that “you always use the possessive with a gerund,” the -ing form of a verb used as a noun. And for those of you still scratching your head, the underlined words here are gerunds:
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
March 2016
Because St. Patrick’s Day is approaching, I thought we could use a little review of apostrophes. Remember, apostrophes stand in for missing letters. If you change I am to I’m, the apostrophe holds the place of the letter a. That’s easy to see. I will becomes I’ll, with the apostrophe standing in for two letters, wi. But some are not so obvious.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
February 2016
We’ve talked about this before, but it’s been a long time, so here’s a review. The rule is that pronouns must agree with the word they are standing in for (called the antecedent when you were in school)
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
January 2016
If you bring out two desserts to a guest and ask which one the guest prefers, you might say, “Would you like this” and show the brownie or “ would you like that” and indicate the snickerdoodle. The guest will know which you are referring to as you raise each plate with the cookies on them.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
December 2015
It seems that we always have trouble with those pesky little commas. In a recent edit of student papers, I discovered that apparently the functions of commas in compound sentences are no longer being taught. They were universally absent in all 30 papers I had to grade.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
October 2015
Apparently we have to bring out reminders periodically to keep people in top form. Yesterday a voice on the radio said he had a “whole nother” idea. I know we have a ton of lazy expressions like this, and we know what the guy meant, but let’s stop using them – at least when anyone can hear.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
September 2015
This morning the voice on the radio announced that something was “the exact same” product as another one. Then an article in the paper said food makers are having a hard time finding natural colorings to replace artificial ones so food can be “the same exact shade of yellow.” Stop for a minute and think about that. If you say something is the same as something else, doesn’t that mean they aren’t different from each other?
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
August 2015
The passive voice, some form of to be used with the past participle of a verb, can be effective if used intentionally.
In the following sentence, the writer does not tell who did the action. The subject (the bill) is the object of the action, and the emphasis is on the action and the object acted upon.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
July 2015
Almost everyone knows the “rule” that says you must never end a sentence with a preposition. They irony is that most people who know this rule don’t know what a preposition is. And they don’t know that there are exceptions.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
June 2015
There’s an epidemic of misspelling afoot. It is showing up mostly on Facebook. People from all over the country have shown symptoms of not being able to handle to vs. two vs. too. Let us examine them one at a time.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
May 2015
I have searched and searched, but I cannot find where the term “such that” instead of “so that” came from. I hear people say it and just edited a manuscript that used it a lot. It feels terribly wrong and a bit pompous, but I can’t find a rule anywhere that tells of its origins or its use.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
April 2015
I taught a class at the University of Washington last quarter and had to learn a computer program called Canvas. I had to call the IT folks a couple of times to find out how to do something, and what I discovered is that the language they speak in IT is not quite conversational English.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
February 2015
We all use whoever and whomever when we don’t know who did something or whom we’re talking about, but sometimes we don’t know which one is right. Just last week I saw two wrong whomevers in the paper’s “RANT & RAVE” section.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
January 2015
Some time ago we talked about making lists. You know that every A. must have a B., and every 1. must have a 2., and that you can NEVER have a single bullet – there must always be a second one. We established that.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
December 2014
A couple of years ago we talked about outlines, and the main thing you were to remember was that you had to have two points to subdivide anything. For every 1 there must be a 2, and for every A there must be a B. Everyone should know that, but I’m discovering that apparently the message didn’t get around much, so here we go again.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
August 2014
You will hear people talking about “Me and” in conversations all around you.
Me and Jim went to the game last night.
Me and my dad had lunch at the new restaurant.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
July 2014
Most writers know how to write dialogue. Each new speaker gets a new paragraph, even for a single word. That’s how the reader knows the voice has changed.
“You told me you cleaned your room.”
“I did.”
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
June 2014
Let’s review of some of those pesky close-but-no-cigar uses that can mar your brilliant writing. Check these out to be sure you are using them all correctly:
Any more/Anymore: The first means additional items; the second refers to additional time.
If you don’t have any more to add than that I look fat, I won’t bother you anymore.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
May 2014
In today’s paper, a quote ended with:
“Therefore, we’ve fallen flat on our face.”
When a sentence like that came up in one of my classes, someone asked if it shouldn’t be “flat on our faces.” The conversation then continued like this:
“How many faces do they have?”
“Maybe they shared one.”
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