A few weeks ago, I taught two grammar seminars to aspiring novelists at the California Crime Writers Conference in Pasadena. The first session was all about the little stuff: lay and lie, commas, and ...

Letters represent sounds. Words are built from letters. A group of words makes a phrase. Add a subject and verb, and you have a clause. If that clause expresses a complete thought, we call it a ...

If you ever want to clear a room, a single word will usually do the trick: grammar. For anyone who had a hypercritical English teacher or a particularly persnickety aunt — and that’s a lot of us — the ...

Last week, we started discussing the differences between a phrase, clause and a sentence. We defined a phrase as a group of words without a subject and a predicate, though standing together to form a ...