Part of an ongoing series of musings about language and oppression, and bias-free* language (or, as I prefer, affirmative language or language of respect).

Cross posted at This Crazy Industry. Feel free to comment here or there. This version has additional linky goodness ( Read more... )

So I'm teaching Grammar for Editors at a local college, starting tomorrow night.

I've posted my first class-discussion exercise over at TCI. It's a find-and-circle-the-errors exercise, and I had a lot of fun writing it. It starts like this:

Welcome to Grammar for Editors! The goal if this course is to enable you guys to function competently as ( Read more... )

This week's Thursday usage note may actually be a grammar note. In fact, it's one I think I might have written about before.

Here's the problem: much of my authors can't tell the difference between an amount of things that can be counted and a number of things that can't, many of the time.

Let us consider apples and rice.

Apples are countable ( Read more... )

Thursday Usage* Note

This CBC article provides a lovely example of redundant reflexism:

The police have now agreed they will allow a person to self-identify themselves as a transsexual.
Query to the CBC and to the police: would it be possible for a person to self-identify someone else as a transsexual ( Read more... )

I especially hate the perfective aspect. If things must take place in the past, let them be continuative, let them be open-ended, let them be imperfective. Let them speak not of things finished but of things begun and things ongoing. It would even be o.k. if they were conditional, or mood-altered and subjunctive, if the statement were "this would ( Read more... )

It's taken me a few months to figure out how to do this. Inspired by sabotabby, I present

Chocolate and Commas
The escapades of a dancing editor

( Comic behind cut )

Dear allegedly literate, graduate-school-attending bloggers,

There's this little mark that looks like an inverted comma. It floats above the line, like this ', and is usually found in between letters. It's called the apostrophe. Some of us paid attention in grade-school, when our teachers prepared carefully hand-lettered flip charts outlining its ( Read more... )