Tag Archives: Anne Curzan

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

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Fragment (consider revising)

We’ve all been there. You are writing (what you think is) a perfectly good sentence in a Word document when, suddenly, the MS Word grammar checker tells you that you should consider revising the ‘fragment’, because something is wrong. Very … Continue reading

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On Microsoft’s Grammar Checker again

A few years ago, Robin Straaijer wrote a blog post about Microsoft’s Grammar Checker. He had been inspired to write the post after hearing Anne Curzan speak on the topic during the ICEHL-17 conference at Zürich in 2012. Reading Anne Curzan’s … Continue reading

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No it didn’t: heighth as a usage problem

Last week, the book Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English came out, edited by Marina Dossena. It includes two papers that are of interest to this project, one by Ulrich Busse, which deals with the usage guides by Alford (1864) and White … Continue reading

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Paper on prescriptivism by Anne Curzan

At the 17th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, one of the plenary papers will be on prescriptivism. The speaker is Anne Curzan, from the University of Michigan, and her paper will be called “Prescriptivism: More Than Descriptivism’s Foil”. The … Continue reading

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