“Many older adults said they feel positively about their lives,” the New York Times reported recently. That sentence probably sounds as acceptable to you as it did to the Times editors. But what if ...

A reader from Coimbatore has sent in this query: “Is it possible for a verb to function as an adjective? Please explain it with some examples.” An adjective is a word that describes (modifies) a noun.

Mastering adjectives and adverbs is crucial for vivid and engaging writing. Many students struggle with this concept, leading to awkward prose and undermining their credibility. Adjectives describe ...

A teacher of English has sent in this query: “The participles of certain verbs function as adjectives in sentences. Many students find it difficult to distinguish between the adjectival and verbal ...

Psychologists, who breathe statistics as a salamander breathes fire, love to count things. They count and classify words to determine what books children should read, what children’s classics should ...

Adverbs are words that modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs. ‘Farmer Frank drives carefully.’ ‘Carefully’ is an adverb describing ‘drives’. It tells us how Farmer Frank drives. Most adverbs end ...

Often, just knowing the general meaning of a word is not enough to help students use the word correctly in a given situation. The features of the word that are embedded in the word ending can give ...

Before 2006, I never gave much thought to nominalizations — noun forms like “beauty” and “the scheduling” that at heart are really adjectives like “beautiful” or verbs like “to schedule.” I was ...

The March issue of The Walrus, Canada’s leading general-interest magazine, features an ad for a speech by a blond, smiling young man named Eric Termuende. His talk is entitled “Connecting the Dots on ...