John McIntyre

Unlearning is an important component of learning

It's hard to set standards for use of the hyphen, because practices and preferences vary widely

In their zeal to be precise, copy editors can adopt false precision.

A tasty dish of black-eyed peas for good luck in the year to come.

A little gift of Barbara Pym's prose for the holidays

Who decided that young people had to be called "youth"?

People who earn academic doctorates are also called "doctor."

The ancients had it all figured out

It's not enough to know why bad writing is bad; you have to understand why good writing is good.

Before you write "conclave," make sure you know what it means

Know when your commas are helping you and when you're wasting punctuation.

Here are a few little things to keep in mind before you share your text with the world

"One who" and "one of those who" are different animals

The prejudice against "hopefully" as a sentence adverb survives, but it is fading

A review of Rob Reinalda's 'Why Editors Drink'

You would like editors if you got to know them

The change in "reticent" to mean "reluctant" is a semantic shift that is not going away.

Where you place prepositional phrases in a sentence can come back to bite you.

Some adjectives are just not up to the job

There is more to begging the question than a logical fallacy.

No point in fretting over "disinterested" and "uninterested"

Many writers forget what their subject was by the time they arrive at their verb

Dictionary panic ensued when someone found Merriam-Webster had included 'irregardless'

You may encounter some trouble marshaling your pronouns

Sometimes language comes at you fast

Some niceties to observe for college graduates

Pray try to keep "anti-Christ" and 'Antichrist' straight

Ten things every editor has heard before

Better to look at what actually works in the language than what some people think is 'correct'

Copy editors may look for a lot of little things, but the little things add up