Today, we found out that our article “Prescriptive attitudes to English” is published, that it has been out for two months already. Thanks, Carmen, for tweeting about it, or I wouldn’t have known. Still, I’m really pleased, and expect Carmen …Continue reading→

Mary Norris, copy-editor and author of the usage guide Between you & me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, shares her knowledge on language use in a series of videos on The New Yorker.   Now in season two, the Comma Queen …Continue reading→

What do try and, only, split infinitives and dangling participles have in common? This is a question we asked a few weeks ago, and I promised to let you know as soon as we found out. Here, then, is a partial answer …Continue reading→

(If this is your first time on this blog: please fill in the acceptability survey below. Thank you!) What do these features have in common? That is something Carmen Ebner and I are going to figure out in the article we …Continue reading→

After Grammar Girl’s Top 10 Grammar Myths in 2010 and the Guardian’s 10 grammar rules you can forget three years later, linguist and author Arika Okrent joins the usage problem shortlisting club with her 4 Fake Grammar Rules You Don’t …Continue reading→

A few years ago, Robin Straaijer wrote a blog post about Microsoft’s Grammar Checker. He had been inspired to write the post after hearing Anne Curzan speak on the topic during the ICEHL-17 conference at Zürich in 2012. Reading Anne Curzan’s …Continue reading→

Last week we ran a workshop with a group of language professionals in which they explored the HUGE database with some practice searches. Those practice search questions are now also available on the database page so you can do the same. …Continue reading→

This is a copy of a book I accidentally found in the Leiden Free Bookshop the other day. It reminded me of eighteenth-century letter writing manuals, so I picked it up. And very much like Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, its final …Continue reading→

I’m going through the final chapter of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014) to find out how many old chestnuts he discusses in his overview of usage problems. I’m always hoping to find new chestnuts, so we’ll wait and see. Of …Continue reading→

… has joined us in our interest in prescritpivism. Read all about it here. And that isn’t all: here’s what they published two days later. Keep sending us more of this. (Thanks, Joan!)