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 ...

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about English grammar and usage — most of which I promptly forgot. And not for lack of use. Every day I apply what I’ve learned to catch and fix writers’ mistakes.

What is happening to the English language? I learned the difference between singular and plural nouns while in elementary school. That was reinforced during middle school, high school and college. It ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

It’s spring cleaning time — an opportunity to sweep out dust bunnies lurking in recesses of recent reading. Let’s start with various forms of disagreement between singular and plural elements in a ...

Some keen-eared Radio National listeners recently took issue with the following sentence, delivered on a book review program: "There's heartbreaking scenes in Murakami's new novel." It's not that the ...

As terse as they normally are, newspaper headlines are designed to get your attention by, as much as possible, summarizing the main body text. Two words in last week’s headline of this column; ...