Author: Mignon Fogarty

Today, we’ll talk about words you should never use and words you should always avoid — or something like that. As many of you know, before I was Grammar Girl, I was a science and technology writer. Even as an undergrad, my instructors said I was especially good at that kind of writing. And my secret was that I hedged everything I wrote. I wouldn’t write anything as definitive as “Scientists found life on Mars.” I would write “Scientists appear to have found life on Mars,” or “Scientists report that they have found signs of life on Mars.” In scientific…

One of my favorite parts of the Grammarpalooza bonus interviews that supporters get is the guests’  book recommendations. Ghostwriting expert Dan Gerstein provided us with three particularly good recommendations that unfortunately, didn’t make it into the podcast — a rare event that I’ve tried to rectify by posting them here. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, by Garry Wills How Lincoln reached back to the Declaration of Independence to write the greatest speech in the nation’s history. A tidbit that Dan provided from the book is that Lincoln was actually not the headliner when he gave the Gettysburg…

There’s been a grammar controversy bubbling up from the new movie “Wicked,” which is an adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked,” which was loosely based on the 1995 novel “Wicked” by Gregory Maguire, which was inspired by the 1939 movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” which was based on the 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum. That’s a lot of media properties! Is ‘The Wizard and I’ grammatically correct? Here’s the deal: A listener named Brian wrote to me and said, “In several scenes in the movie, Elphaba corrects Glinda’s grammar, yet she sings an entire…

A couple of weeks ago I missed an incorrect use of the word “hung” when I was editing a Grammar Girl podcast episode that mentioned Guy Fawkes being hanged for treason — instead saying he was “hung” for treason — so today I’m going over the proper use in case I confused people. The standard quip is that curtains are hung and people are hanged. It’s not quite that cut-and-dried — some of my reference books say “hung” isn’t wrong, just less customary, when referring to past executions, and the Random House Unabridged Dictionary says that “hung” is becoming more…

Have you heard about the required order of adjectives in English? A few years ago, a paragraph from Mark Forsyth’s book “The Elements of Eloquence” that described this regular order of adjectives went viral on Twitter. The concept pops up again every year or so and blows people’s minds anew. He said, “You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you  mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.” Now, I’ve loved more than one of Forsyth’s various books — in fact, I should have him on the…

which vs that To understand the difference between “which” and “that,” first you need to understand the difference between a restrictive element and a non-restrictive element, because the simple rule is to use “that” with a restrictive element and “which” with a non-restrictive element.  Restrictive Clauses and Nonrestrictive Clauses A restrictive element is just part of a sentence you can’t get rid of because it specifically restricts the noun. Here’s an example: The cupcakes that have sprinkles are still in the fridge. The words “that have sprinkles” restrict the kind of cupcake we’re talking about. Without those words, the meaning…

Today I’ll explain the difference between dashes, commas, and parentheses. Have you ever been sitting at your computer writing, and suddenly you aren’t sure whether you should use parentheses, commas, or dashes to set off some extra point or an aside? It happens to me because in a lot of cases these marks are interchangeable, at least grammatically. But they each do give your writing a different feeling. In general, you can think of parentheses, commas, and dashes as a continuum of punctuation marks. Parentheses are the quiet whisper of an aside, commas are the conversational voice of a friend…

ChatGPT and other chatbots like Claude and Gemini have seen stunningly rapid adoption in the last year or so. You probably remember all the AI-related words in our word-of-the-year episode a few months ago. And a January survey by MuckRack found that 64% of PR professionals were already using AI at work, and a more recent February survey by Pew Research Center found that even among all employed Americans, which would include people who do almost no writing or editing — even in that huge and diverse group, 20% say they’ve used ChatGPT at work. I absolutely believe it’s going…

Anabell asked, “Is it correct or incorrect to say ‘anyways’ to someone? As in ‘Anyways, call me later!’ ‘Anyways’ sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me.” Thanks, Anabell! The standard word is “anyway,” which is probably why the sound of “anyways” bothers you so much. “Anyway” has some other uses, but you’ve probably most likely heard people say it with an S in a sentence like this, where “anyway” is a way of redirecting a conversation back to the topic at hand:  Anyway, we need to get more confetti. Or maybe in a sentence like this, where “anyway” means…

If you watched the recent “Curb your Enthusiasm” finale on HBO, you may have been delighted to see the old Americanism “catawampus” playing a central role in the plot. ‘Catawampus’ on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Among all the typical quirkiness that led to Larry David being put on trial for giving a bottle of water to a voter, that voter rips him to shreds on the witness stand after hearing Larry’s manager Jeff use the word (da-da-da) “catawampus” and realizing he had earlier tricked her into revealing her secret salad dressing recipe on a phone call in which he used that…