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 ...

Apostrophes are equal opportunity humiliators. As I wrote recently, apostrophes incriminate less-word-savvy types by popping up in plurals like “We play bridge with the Smith’s” and “He had two ...

Hyphens are only used to combine certain words together. They are not strong enough to set off phrases or words from a sentence. Use hyphens in the following situations: Use in compound numbers and ...

I woke yesterday morning to an e-mail from an editor at a London newspaper asking whether, as the author of a book about the world of competitive Scrabble, I had any thoughts on the news that "the ...