Elwyn Brooks White was an American writer. He was the author of several highly popular books for children, including Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte's Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970).
Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves, is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, to refer to an unknown person, or to refer to every person of some group, in sentences such as:
A split infinitive is a grammatical construction in which an adverb or adverbial phrase separates the "to" and "infinitive" constituents of what was traditionally called the "full infinitive", but is more commonly known in modern linguistics as the to-infinitive. In the history of English language aesthetics, the split infinitive was often deprecated, despite its prevalence in colloquial speech. The opening sequence of the Star Trek television series contains a well-known example, "to boldly go where no man has gone before", wherein the adverb boldly was said to split the full infinitive, to go. Multiple words may split a to-infinitive, such as: "The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years."
William Strunk Jr. was an American professor of English at Cornell University and the author of The Elements of Style (1918). After his former student E. B. White revised and extended the book, The Elements of Style became an influential guide to writing in the English language, informally known as “Strunk & White”.
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words, and the use of foreign terms, the dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. Hence, the 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, edited by Ernest Gowers, which was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition was re-titled as The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield, as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data; and the 2015 fourth edition, revised and re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield, as a usage dictionary. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.
And/or is an English grammatical conjunction used to indicate that one, more, or all of the cases it connects may occur. It is used as an inclusive or, because saying "or" in spoken or written English might be inclusive or exclusive.
Linguistic prescription is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language, including rules of spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society or sector of a society perceives as a correct or proper form, or advise on effective and stylistically apt communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to language change; if radical, it may produce neologisms. Such prescription may be motivated by attempts to improve the consistency of language to make it more "logical"; to improve the rhetorical effectiveness of speakers; to align with the prescriber's aesthetics or personal preference; to impose linguistic purity on a language by removing foreign influences; or to avoid causing offense.
An English writing style is a combination of features in an English language composition that has become characteristic of a particular writer, a genre, a particular organization, or a profession more broadly.
In the English language, there are grammatical constructions that many native speakers use unquestioningly yet certain writers call incorrect. Differences of usage or opinion may stem from differences between formal and informal speech and other matters of register, differences among dialects, and so forth. Disputes may arise when style guides disagree with each other, or when a guideline or judgement is confronted by large amounts of conflicting evidence or has its rationale challenged.
The serial comma is a comma placed after the second-to-last term in a list when writing out three or more terms. For example, a list of three countries might be punctuated without the serial comma as "France, Italy and Spain" or with the serial comma as "France, Italy, and Spain". The serial comma can help avoid ambiguity in some situations, but can also create it in others. There is no universally-accepted standard for when to use the Oxford comma.
In written English usage, a comma splice or comma fault is the use of a comma to join two independent clauses. For example:
It is nearly half past five, we cannot reach town before dark.
In the context of written composition, drafting refers to any process of generating preliminary versions of a written work. Drafting happens at any stage of the writing process as writers generate trial versions of the text they're developing. At the phrasal level, these versions may last less than a second, as writers compose and then delete trial sentences; as fully developed attempts that have reached the end of a stage of usefulness, draft documents may last for perpetuity as saved "versions" or as paper files in archives.
Relative clauses in the English language are formed principally by means of relative words. The basic relative pronouns are who, which, and that; who also has the derived forms whom and whose. Various grammatical rules and style guides determine which relative pronouns may be suitable in various situations, especially for formal settings. In some cases the relative pronoun may be omitted and merely implied.
In English, the passive voice is marked by a subject that is followed by a stative verb complemented by a past participle. For example:
The enemy was defeated. Caesar was stabbed.
A writing process is a set of mental and physical steps that someone takes to create any type of text. Almost always, these activities require inscription equipment, either digital or physical: chisels, pencils, brushes, chalk, dyes, keyboards, touchscreens, etc.; each of these tools has unique affordances that influence writers' workflows. Writing processes are very individualized and task-specific; they frequently incorporate activities such as talking, drawing, reading, browsing, and other activities that are not typically associated with writing.
Maira Kalman is an American artist, illustrator, writer, and designer known for her painting and writing about the human condition. She is the author and illustrator of over 30 books for adults and children and her work is exhibited in museums around the world. She has been a regular contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU), written by Bryan A. Garner and published by Oxford University Press, is a usage dictionary and style guide for contemporary Modern English. It was first published in 1998 as A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, with a focus on American English, which it retained for the next two editions as Garner's Modern American Usage (GMAU). It was expanded to cover English more broadly in the 2016 fourth edition, under the present title. The work covers issues of usage, pronunciation, and style, from distinctions among commonly confused words and phrases to notes on how to prevent verbosity and obscurity. In addition, it contains essays about the English language. An abridged version of the first edition was also published as The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style in 2000 and a similar version was published in The Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition in 2017. The latter includes three sections titled "Grammar", "Syntax" and "Word Usage", each with several subcategories.
Follett's Modern American Usage is the book published with the title Modern American Usage which was left in draft form and unfinished by Wilson Follett at his death. It was completed and edited by his friend Jacques Barzun in collaboration with six other editors. It is a usage guide for contemporary American English. Modern American Usage covers issues of usage, prose composition, and style, including English grammar, syntax, and literary techniques.
This list comprises widespread modern beliefs about English language usage that are documented by a reliable source to be misconceptions.
Nevile Martin Gwynne is a British writer who has gained recognition and some criticism for his book Gwynne's Grammar. He has also written Gwynne's Latin. In April 2013 a grammar test devised by Gwynne was published by The Daily Telegraph. He spent his early days in Gloucestershire before attending Eton College and Oxford University, graduating with a degree in Modern languages. He later qualified as a Chartered Accountant at the British Institute of Chartered Accountants.
