There are a few rules that are drummed so incessantly into our heads in school that we cannot help but internalize them. One is "No sentence fragments!" Actually, that should be "Don't use sentence ...

A dependent clause cannot stand alone, though they often contain both a subject and a verb. Where independent clauses express complete thoughts, dependent clauses do not, and left on their own, ...

In 1919, the young E.B. White, future New Yorker writer and author of Charlotte’s Web, took a class at Cornell University with a drill sergeant of an English professor named William Strunk Jr. Strunk ...

Semicolons must combine similar elements and are either used to combine complete sentences or items in a long, complicated list. Use semicolons in the following situations: Combine two complete ...

Most people know a good sentence when they read one, but New York Times columnist Stanley Fish says most of us don't really know how to write them ourselves. His new book, How To Write A Sentence: And ...

Letters represent sounds. Words are built from letters. A group of words makes a phrase. Add a subject and verb, and you have a clause. If that clause expresses a complete thought, we call it a ...

Judith C. Hochman has long seen holes in writing instruction. “We’re very good at assigning writing,” she explains. “We’re not very good at teaching kids how to write.” In 2012, the Hochman Method, as ...

Reading and writing were always my favorite subjects when I was in school, and I can still remember when I was taught that a proper paragraph had five sentences in it. It was probably around fourth ...