The length of a sentence isn’t what makes it hard to understand— it’s how long you have to wait for a phrase to be completed. When you’re reading a sentence, you don’t understand it word by word, but ...

Today’s topic is going to be a bit technical. Although it centres on three common grammatical elements, it involves some technicalities, the type we usually want to as much as possible play down in ...

James Eagan Holmes, the perpetrator of the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, received one of the most complex and lengthy sentences ever delivered in the U.S. His punishment included 12 ...

A sentence is a group of words that include a subject and verb, and usually expresses one complete thought. ‘Selena lives on the new space station’ is an example of a sentence. Sentences are made up ...

In a sentence, the verb describes the main action or state of the subject. Different types of verbs have different functions: A sentence is built up from words. Sometimes words are grouped together in ...

But because adverbs can modify whole sentences, you often have some flexibility in where you put them: I only have eyes for you. When there’s a danger of an unclear meaning, keep your “only” close to ...

When combining two complete sentences with a conjunction ("and," "but," "or," "for," or "yet"), precede the conjunction with a comma. Example: Still, the sun is slowly getting brighter and hotter, and ...

Here is the opening of an early draft of an essay about teaching mathematics written years ago by a celebrated professor. As he himself has acknowledged, he is a less than gifted writer, and our goal ...

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 ...