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Monthly Archives: November 2015
What are your thoughts on the Microsoft grammar and style checker?
In the past two years, we’ve been publishing a series of interactive features in the journal English Today as a way to engage more readers in issues of interest to our research project. (Past features can also be found on … Continue reading
Posted in polls and surveys
Tagged attitudes to usage, English Today, grammar, Microsoft Grammar Checker, survey
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Ingrid Tieken interviewed by Paul Brians
Last week, Paul Brians interviewed Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade about her work in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project and about the book she is writing on usage guides as a text type. A podcast of the interview was published on … Continue reading
Happy birthday, Paul Brians!
Another one of our usage guide writer’s birthdays! Paul Brians is the author of Common Errors in English Usage, published in 2003, one of the usage guides in our HUGE database. Paul also has a website, a blog, a daily calendar (for … Continue reading
Posted in biography, news
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Hoary witticisms and other prescriptivist jokes
In going through our usage guides, we occasionally come across linguistic jokes – not terribly funny, admittedly, but they apparently appeal to writers on usage. And they have done so from the earliest days of the usage guide tradition onwards, … Continue reading
Posted in usage guide
Tagged flat adverbs, Vizetelly, Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
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Adding the Mx: Gender-neutral titles and pronouns
In the Q&A section of the Chicago Manual of Style Online, a question was posed about editing out they as a personal pronoun in reference to a transgender person. Here is the disputed sentence: “During Harry’s senior year, they were … Continue reading
Happy birthday, Harry Blamires!
Harry Blamires (b. 1916) is the oldest living usage guide writer in our HUGE database, and what is more, he has turned 99 today! Harry Blamires wrote several books on English, such as English in Education (of which I was told by … Continue reading
What’s the fuss about the controversial SPaG test?
The 2016 version of the Key Stage 2 Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar test, also known as SPaG test, has made the headlines in the UK again. Michael Rosen has often voiced his concerns about the test publically and did so again … Continue reading
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