When you celebrate your birthday, are you the celebrant or the celebrator? For some people, the words may seem synonymous and interchangeable, while some may not have even heard the word celebrator. Most people use the phrase “birthday celebrant” to refer to people who celebrate their birthday. Now, is this correct or is this only... Continue Reading →
Which is correct, “I ate three Toblerones” or “I ate three bars of Toblerone”? Some argue that the latter is correct and the former is, of course, erroneous. Their reason? Food is a mass noun, and they do not have plural forms; you have to use adjectives to indicate their amount, quantity, or number. However,... Continue Reading →
Ever since I was a kid, my mother has been telling me that I cannot make enough money out of writing, but I proved her wrong, and I will continue to prove those people who say the same wrong. I have heard this opinion from so many people and even from the media—movies, TV series,... Continue Reading →
Back when I was in the ESL career, I taught technical and creative writing to some of the advance students we had. One of the basic topics I covered is the sentence structure (or types of sentences). I usually give at least a week to discuss all the elements of a sentence with my students—that... Continue Reading →
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. —Mark Twain Often times, we find ourselves groping for the right words to describe somebody or something, be it abstract or concrete. Unlike Shakespeare, we do not have the authority to coin new words to... Continue Reading →
An adjective is a word, a phrase, or a clause that modifies (describes) a noun or a noun equivalent. Its main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase and more information about the object signified. Form An adjective can be a word, a phrase, or a clause. Kirby is an... Continue Reading →
Composing a sentence does not seem to be a hard task. Well, that may be in spoken language. Errors in sentence construction are hardly noticeable in a spoken conversation since we do not see the punctuation, capitalization, pattern, spelling, etc. But in writing, it is a totally different story. In writing, we see more than... Continue Reading →
Q. When referring to a zombie, should I use the relative pronoun who (which would refer to a person) or that (since, technically, the zombie is no longer living)? Essentially, does a zombie cease to become a “person” in the grammatical sense? A. Let’s assume this is a serious question, in which case you, as the writer,... Continue Reading →
“If I will be a girl, I think I will be a slut.” Okay. So the sentence above is wrong in so many levels, especially in grammatical sense. The sentence above is an example of a conditional. Conditionals are sentences expressing factual implications or hypothetical situations and their consequences. They are so called because the... Continue Reading →
It hasn’t been long since I started writing grammar posts, but I have been studying grammar since 2006, and I have even taught basic, intermediate, and advance grammar both in ESL and university settings. I am not saying that I have mastered grammar; I still make occasional mistakes. But I am quite confident to make... Continue Reading →
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