Orthography is the study of a given language’s writing conventions. In English, for example, orthography deals not just with spelling and grammar, but also with punctuation marks like the period or exclamation mark and the use of spaces. Of course, every language has its own conventions. Japanese orthography in particular has to contend with three …
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Everyone knows their address, but it’s a fact that many people experience anxiety when asked to enter that address into a form or write it on an envelope. What should be a simple matter of putting in a street name, a street number and possibly apartment or suite number becomes unnecessarily complicated by arcane …
Ask anyone who’s ever written an essay how he or she feels about commas and you’re likely to receive a groan for an answer. Despite the comma hate, this piece of punctuation has only a few basic rules. Part of the problem is that writers tend to hyper-focus on how commas interact with specific words. …
Is there a comma before since? There is usually no comma before since, as “since” is a subordinating conjunction. “Since” can also function as both a preposition and an adverb. In these roles, too, a comma preceding ‘since’ is generally unnecessary. ”Since” as a preposition — Comma Rules When “since” acts as a preposition, …
Whenever you start learning a language, there are always a few things that are bound to stump you. There are words that have multiple meanings, and the only way to figure out the meaning is from the surrounding contexts. There are phrases and expressions that are completely idiomatic and have nothing to do with the …
Not many writers think commas are fun. In fact, they stress a lot of people out. But commas don’t have to make you pull your hair! The trick to understanding commas is to break apart the sentence itself, identify the parts of it, and then use a few simple rules to determine when and where …
We’ve already seen how confusing commas can be. We’ve talked about curious adverbs such as “regardless,” and we’ve scrutinized polysemic words, aka words that have more than one meaning, including the word “rather.” However, not all polysemic words should be treated in the same manner. What applies to a word like “rather” might not apply …
Commas are confusing creatures. You don’t know when to use them and when to ditch them. Nevertheless, you must learn when to add a comma to your sentence if you want to make your writing more legible. You see, a big part of using commas revolves around the meaning of a sentence and the information …
English can be confusing. Thanks to the language’s many different origins, the vocabulary alone is enough to make anyone’s head spin. You have words that should rhyme but don’t, you have nouns that give you irregular plurals that seem arbitrary, and you have some words whose spelling will confound even the most practiced native speakers. …