by Tom Corson-Knowles
Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelled differently. They can be a tricky part of English grammar, since it’s easy to confuse one homophone with another. Here are some examples of common homophones: to, too, two meat, meet, mete right, rite,...
by Tom Corson-Knowles
Americans and Brits may appear to speak the same language, but there are many subtle (and some not-so-subtle) differences in American and British English. When it comes to spelling, American English and British English can be surprisingly different—but there are a few...
by Tom Corson-Knowles
The English language contains more than 500,000 words, many of them borrowed from other languages. Its closest competitor in the language sweepstakes is German, with just under 200,000 words. Because of these verbal riches, English is more semantically complex than...
by Tom Corson-Knowles
Writers have used shortcuts and abbreviations for centuries. That’s not surprising, especially when you consider the manual effort involved in putting stylus, quill, brush, or pen to tablet, papyrus, vellum, silk, or paper. Several Latin abbreviations have...
by Tom Corson-Knowles
Latin was once the language of scholars and academics in the Western world. Although this is no longer the case, many terms that have been used for centuries remain staples of modern speech. The crime was hidden by sealed records and sub rosa operations. Once I...
by Tom Corson-Knowles |
Learning to use strong language is crucial to your success as a writer, and strong verbs are a great way to improve your writing by changing just one simple word. But writing verbs correctly is an important skill that is rarely taught these days in writing classes. In...
