The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house? Even after all my years of editing, I can still get tripped up trying to make verbs agree with collective ...

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 ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Forming a plural is pretty easy, right? You just add an “s” to something. Unless, of course, it’s a word that already ends ...

For more than a millennium after the fall of Rome, educated Europeans were distinguished by their knowledge of Latin. One of the three subjects of the trivium—the basic tier of a classical education, ...

However, there are many types of noun and noun phrase in English, and it can be difficult to know if a particular noun takes a singular verb (such as DOES / HAS / AM / IS ) or a plural verb (DO / HAVE ...

When I saw “men’s’ clothing” with two apostrophes, I figured it must be a typo. I was editing a professional writer who’s been on the job for years, and I know from experience that writers make typos, ...

Rob Pensalfini is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Drama at the University of Queensland, and the Artistic Director of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble. Contemporary accents in particular would ...