Remember voting for senior class superlatives? One female and one male student would be named “Best Dressed” or “Most Likely to Succeed” or “Best School Spirit.” Only one student from each gender ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... “Police, Adjective” confounds expectations. It’s neither a conventional crime film nor a police drama. Rather it’s a gently subversive intellectual exercise, ...

Mastering adjectives and adverbs is crucial for vivid and engaging writing. Many students struggle with this concept, leading to awkward prose and undermining their credibility. Adjectives describe ...

Aspiring science-fiction authors receive one piece of advice above all others: Forsake the adverb, the killer of prose. It’s terribly, awfully, horrendously important. But why? Really, adverbs aren’t ...

Adjectives must agree with the noun in gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural). Make most adjectives agree with the nouns by adding 'e', 's' or 'es'. Position of adjectives in ...

Consider one of William Strunk’s better pieces of advice in “The Elements of Style”: “Omit needless words.” Now consider this rejoinder from University of Edinburgh Linguistics professor Geoffrey ...