Americans may be surprised to learn that British punctuation doesn’t ALWAYS go outside the quotation marks. On the Guardian’s Mind Your Language blog, David Marsh explains the not especially logical logic of British punctuation.
On their blog Grammarphobia, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman explain the difference between “thirty-year mortgage” and “thirty years’ time.”
This useful overview from Grammar Girl illuminates some of the finer points of this tricky issue, including when you’ve got a noun phrase serving as the object of a preposition, as in “I want to speak to whoever did this.” (If you thought it should be “whomever,” do check out the post.)
Stan Carey makes the case for the singular “they,” with a round-up of other recent posts on this oft-discussed topic.
Language Log discusses a note from Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage, that “regardless of whether” is correct and “regardless whether” is widely shunned. I have never heard the latter form myself, but LL’s commentary from a linguistic point of view is quite interesting.
A thorough look at whilst/while, amongst/among, amidst/amid from Stan Carey on his blog Sentence First.
From the archives of Language Log, a linguistic look at multiple negation.
Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage, and Robert Lane Greene, correspondent for the Economist and author of You Are What You Speak, debate the difference between a sound language rule and a made-up shibboleth on the NYT’s “Room for Debate.”
Lucy Ferriss on verb tense in academic writing. From Lingua Franca.
In belated observance of National Punctuation Day (9/24), a post on the underappreciated en-dash, and in particular its obscure role as a substitute for the hyphen in compound adjectives where one side of the compound has multiple words. From John Petrie’s Life Blag.
