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What to Do About ‘Or’?
Today let’s talk about how to make sure subjects and verbs agree when a word like “or” comes into play. There can be more to this than meets the eye. This grammar game begins with a few terms to help you keep the rules in hand. The subject is the person, thing, or idea directing…
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How to Get Over Yourself, Grammatically Speaking
Myself. Yourself. Herself. Himself. Itself. Ourselves. Themselves. Yourselves. What are these words and how do we use them? They’re pronouns. (Quick refresher: Pronouns step in for nouns. They save us lots of boring repetition.) “Mrs. Smith baked a pie, and she shared it with her first grade class.” Without pronouns, look what happens to this…
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Effective Ways to Use ‘Affect’ in a Sentence (or Affecting Uses of ‘Effect’)
If you do a search for “most common grammar errors,” the affect/effect duo is going to turn up. These two words are homophones. That means they sound alike. Well, they’re almost homophones; though not identical, they sound very much alike. We can see the difference in their spellings, but we don’t always hear it when…
