A few weeks ago, I taught two grammar seminars to aspiring novelists at the California Crime Writers Conference in Pasadena. The first session was all about the little stuff: lay and lie, commas, and ...

Letters represent sounds. Words are built from letters. A group of words makes a phrase. Add a subject and verb, and you have a clause. If that clause expresses a complete thought, we call it a ...

If you ever want to clear a room, a single word will usually do the trick: grammar. For anyone who had a hypercritical English teacher or a particularly persnickety aunt — and that’s a lot of us — the ...

1. Relative clauses are “embedded” grammatical structures, contained inside other grammatical structures. 2. Relative clauses play a central role in English discourse. 3. Relative clause knowledge is ...