Author: Mignon Fogarty
Mignon Fogarty
Mignon Fogarty is the founder of Quick and Dirty Tips and the author of seven books on language, including the New York Times bestseller "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing." She is an inductee in the Podcasting Hall of Fame, and the show is a five-time winner of Best Education Podcast in the Podcast Awards. She has appeared as a guest expert on the Oprah Winfrey Show and the Today Show. Her popular LinkedIn Learning courses help people write better to communicate better. Find her on Mastodon.
March 4 is National Grammar Day, so I have a special top-10 show to celebrate the occasion, and before you argue with me, read the whole explanation about why each of these is a myth. Then, get all of these tips in one place with my National Grammar Day playlist on Spotify. Grammar Girl’s Top 10 Language Myths 10. A run-on sentence is a really long sentence Wrong! They can actually be quite short. In a run-on sentence, independent clauses are squished together without the help of punctuation or a conjunction. If you write “I am short he is…
A few years ago, I was listening to the Range podcast made by two of my friends — Julia Ritchey and Amy Westervelt. It’s a great show about life in the West, and this particular episode was about the controversies surrounding coyote hunting, but about halfway through the podcast, I noticed that people were pronouncing “coyote” two different ways: the three syllable “coyote” and the two-syllable “coyote.” Here are two clips: Julia Ritchie (podcast host): After their first petition to get a coyote hunting ban failed, they tried again in November of last year, and about 40 people spoke. I…
Every month or two I get a question like this one from Scott. He says he’s been fighting with his editors over a sentence that’s been driving him crazy. Should it be We want to know the proportion of all M&M’s that is blue or We want to know the proportion of all M&M’s that are blue. He says, “I know that ‘proportion’ is singular, so the verb that would go with it is ‘is.’ Clearly though, it’s the M&Ms that “are” blue, not the proportion. But, the proportion needs to be the subject of the sentence. Any other…
Let’s say you just backed up your computer, and you get a message that says, “Your data is now safe.” Super. But wait. Should that be “Your data are now safe”? ‘Data’: The Latin Plural of ‘Datum” The word “data” comes to English from Latin, in which “datum” is the singular and “data” is the plural. If you’re sticking with that history, it should be “Your data are now safe.” “Data.” Plural. ‘Data’: The English Singular Meaning ‘Information’ But I bet that sounds weird to a lot of you because since the 1940s, people have been using “data” as a…
In a recent podcast, I talked about some differences between British and American English, and I read a listener comment from an American who lived abroad for several years and noticed that British friends said “take a decision” instead of “make a decision,” but then I got a lot of feedback from British people who said they never say or hear “take a decision.” So I did a Twitter poll to try to get more information. (Audio for that podcast is in the upper right corner of the “dead idioms” page.) Results of a Twitter poll showing that only 17%…
Jeffrey wrote in after he noticed that I pronounced “caramel” as “car-muhl” a few weeks ago, and that sounded wrong to him. The Harvard Dialect Survey found that the three-syllable pronunciation (car-a-mel) is dominant all along the east coast of the United States, from Maine to Florida and extending into the south, through Atlanta, Mississippi, Louisiana, and parts of Texas. Jeffrey, it turns out, was born and raised in New York, which explains why “car-a-mel” is the way he’s used to hearing it. My parents are from the midwest, I grew up in Seattle, and I’ve lived in the west…
What you call a long, upholstered piece of living room furniture depends on where you live and when you were born. ‘Davenport’ For example, “couch” and “sofa” are currently the most popular names, but my parents called it a davenport because that name was once common in the upper Midwest, which is where my parents grew up. The name came from the A.H. Davenport Company, a manufacturer of this type of furniture in the mid-1800s and into the early 1900s, including pieces that furnished the White House. From a Google Ngram search in books, it looks as if “davenport” peaked…
“Cannot” and “can not” might seem like they mean the same thing, but you use them in different ways. ‘Cannot’ “Cannot” is usually the word you want. It means “unable to” or “unwilling to” do something. I cannot come to rehearsal tonight. Mom said I cannot have the car tomorrow. ‘Can Not’ “Can not” is occasionally used as an alternative to the one word “cannot,” but it shows up most often when the word “not” is just part of something that comes right after “can.” For example, use “can not,” (two words) when “not” is part of a “not only…
Mike wrote in with a question that I’ve always wondered about too. What’s up with the apostrophe in “Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse”? It seems like a weird name, like it should be Ruth Chris’s Steakhouse. Fortunately, the company has the story on its website, and after you hear it, it’ll make sense. Ruth’s Chris Steak House There really was a Ruth, and her name was Ruth Fertel. In 1965, she bought a steak house in New Orleans called “Chris Steak House,” and she ran the restaurant for many years, turning it into a huge local success, according to the website. But…
Today, as promised, we’ll talk about how to mix quotation marks with other punctuation. Quotation Marks with Commas and Periods One of the most common question people ask me is whether periods and commas go inside or outside a closing quotation mark, and there’s a reason everyone is confused: the rules in American English are different from the rules in British English, so if you’re regularly reading American and British publications, such as the BBC and CNN websites, you’ll regularly see it done different ways. In America, we use a hard-and-fast rule that was supposedly designed by compositors to…