If there is one absolute in life, it is this: the English language is ridiculous. The guidelines often seem so arbitrarily set that I have no doubt that grammar trolls designed the rulebooks with the sole intention of tripping us up. I picture them hunkering down in...
Allusion vs. illusion can often cause confusion because these words not only sound very similar when spoken, they are almost identically spelled in writing. However, they refer to two very different things, which makes mixing them up in a blog post or essay all the...
If I said that I feel badly, would you tell me to eat a cup of chicken noodle soup and rest, or would you wonder why my sense of touch is messed up? The bad vs. badly misunderstanding is persistent, so let’s make sense of these commonly confused words. Bad vs. Badly...
“Because you’re standing close by, can you close the door to my clothes closet?” OK, so maybe this isn’t a line you’re going to find yourself uttering on a regular basis, but it does give you a sense of why clothes and close are sometimes confused or otherwise used in...
Once upon a time in a land far away, I was a high school English teacher. When reading essays, I saw many instances of students mixing up homophones in their writing. Homophones can be especially difficult to differentiate between in your writing, because while in the...
One of the first spelling lessons that was taught in grade school was to simply sound it out. It’s a perfectly easy method of spelling a word that couldn’t go wrong, right? Enter the world of homonyms vs. homophones. Just hearing a word that falls under one of...
