“Walking through the door, the smell hit me.” The smell was not walking. English attaches an opening phrase to whatever comes next, whether you meant it to or not.

A cold, damp morning takes a comma. A dirty white shirt does not. There are two tests, they always agree, and neither takes longer than a second.

Chicken soup, bus stop, customer service improvement programme delivery framework. English lets nouns modify nouns, and it does not warn you when the stack gets too tall.

The people correcting this one have it backwards, and the reason why explains a whole category of verbs.

One ending describes how you feel. The other describes what caused it. Confusing them produces sentences that are grammatical and accidentally insulting.

A small-business owner and a small business owner are different people. The hyphen is not decoration; it tells the reader which words go together.

A few adjectives describe absolutes. Modify them and half your readers will wince, for a reason they can rarely explain.

One comma, two respectable style guides, and decades of people insisting the other side is illiterate. Here is what is actually at stake.

The rule against it was invented in the nineteenth century by people who thought English should behave like Latin. It never did, and it never has.

Synonyms are not equivalents. The word that means the same thing can still be the wrong word, and a thesaurus will never tell you which.