Update (June 2014)
As part of a company-wide redesign, About.com has eliminated blogs from all its sites, including Grammar & Composition. Links to new articles and exercises will continue to appear on our home page and in the weekly Grammar & Composition Newsletter.
May 2014
- Getting the Words Right
- Sentence Building and Combining: 25 Exercises
- End Punctuation!
- Alan Coren on Waiting for the Third Idea
- A Baggy Dog and a Lamb of Leg: Unintentional Word Play
- Let's Keep This Short
- How to Stop Wasting Words
- Shel Silverstein on the Communication Process
- Contact Clauses, Pseudo-Passives, and Assemblage Errors: There's a Name for It (#31)
- Punctuation on the Road
- Gushers and Tricklers
- Hear Ye, Hear Ye: What Does "Ye" Mean?
- Chili Palmer on Commonly Confused Latin Abbreviations
- Christopher Morley's Limericks on Usage
April 2014
- Buzzwords, Borrowed Words, and Beautiful Words: Language in the News
- Some Peculiar Habits of Writers at Work
- 10 Mistakes That Your Spell Checker Will Never Catch
- A Birthday Special: Shakespeare's Figures of Speech
- 10 Pros on Prose
- Between the Dashes
- A Springtime Stroll on the Lighter Side of Language
- What's the The Hardest Part of Writing?
- Revising for an Audience
- Make Way for Minor Sentences
- Developing the Write Attitude
- H.L. Mencken on the Joys of Criticism
- Websites for Logophiles: "Did you know . . .?"
March 2014
- Loanwords, Language Change, and Forensic Linguistics: Language in the News
- Six Quick Tips for Achieving Emphasis in Writing and Speech
- A Remarkable Linguistic Invention: Huh?
- Dr. J. on the Dark Side of Writing
- Personification Is Alive and Well
- 19th-Century Language Lessons: Cobbett's Letters on Practical Grammar
- "Whack at Your Reader at Once": H.G. Wells on How to Begin an Essay
- Bad Advice on Writing
- Be-Deletion, Particle Movement, and Solidarity Talk: There's a Name for It (#30)
- Misspelling Conventions
- A Heap of Empty Phrases
- The Day After National Grammar Day
- Quiz on Commonly Confused Words (Winter 2014)
February 2014
- Good English Teachers, Borrowed Words, and Digital Punctuation: Language in the News
- A Very Overworked Modifier
- English Nouns: A Starter Kit
- Essayists on the Essay
- New Exercises and Quizzes (Winter 2014)
- The Difference Between Colons and Semicolons
- 25 Grammatical Terms That We Should Have Learned in School
- Swatting Superfluous Apostrophes
- The World Wide Waldens Essay Contest: "Live Deliberately"
- Exercising With E.B. White's "Sentence Mécanique"
- 99 Love Metaphors for Valentine's Day
- Ben Yagoda on Whomever
- Inviting Writers to Class
January 2014
- Sweet Words and Smelly Words: Language in the News
- Remembering School Compositions
- A Quick Quiz: What's the Usage?
- Tips for Becoming a Better Rewriter
- Notes in Winter From the Lighter Side of Language
- Writers on Paragraphing
- Go Figure: Dr. Mardy's Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations
- Whatever Happened to the Parts of Speech?
- Ten Things You May Not Have Known About Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" Speech
- Texting, Circa 1860
- Soused Synonyms (Sort of)
- Fresh Essay Topics
- H-Dropping, Negative Concord, and the Double Perfect: There's a Name for It (#29)
- Linguistic Leftovers for 2014
- If You Really Want to Write . . .