Gerunds are the -ing form of a verb, and infinitives are the to + base form. These words can be confusing; they combine the meaning of a verb with the grammar of a noun. My father asked me to phone ...

Although English-language verbs generally don’t inflect or change in form to agree with the subject in number, they do so in the present tense, third-person singular. In English grammar, in this ...

Active voice keeps readers interested and engaged. You can use Microsoft Word features to find passive verbs, and even entire passive sentences, while you compose your documents. Configure the Word ...

Some keen-eared Radio National listeners recently took issue with the following sentence, delivered on a book review program: "There's heartbreaking scenes in Murakami's new novel." It's not that the ...

WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn English grammar, many of us were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions.For instance, perhaps ...

It may seem from some of my recent newsletters — championing “they” as a singular pronoun and “me” as a subject pronoun — that there’s something about being a linguist that makes one strangely ...