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In celebration of the world’s greatest horseracing festival here in Melbourne – just over a kilometre, in fact, from where I sit right now – I am taking an equine theme this month for commonly confused words. There is a third homophone (or word that sounds the same) for this pair: rain. For some reason,
The vocative comma is a comma that separates the name of a person we are writing or talking to from the rest of a sentence: put more simply, it separates the name of the person we are writing to from what we are writing about. (The name vocative come from a Latin word that means
The main rule to remember with forward slashes is that you rarely need to use them at all. Their main use these days is in URLs: https://www.apostrophes.com.au. If you need to write a fraction in text, you may need to use a forward slash as the line that divides the numerator and denominator (or the
One of the most widely known grammar rules is ‘don’t use a comma before and‘. Unfortunately, while this applies most of the time, there are a number of cases where we must use a comma before and. The rule really should be ‘don’t use a comma before and, unless it is needed to make your
A new feature for my blog: for my first post in every month, I’ll look at some commonly confused words. This month, with the first bushfire warnings being broadcast, I’m looking at impact, affect and effect. Impact is overused these days; my theory is that this is because people are not confident in using effect
Colons, like semicolons, are a sadly neglected punctuation mark. They deserve to have their versatility recognised and used far more widely. Unlike semicolons, which have two functions (see my earlier post on ‘What do I use a semicolon for?’), colons have a number of uses. Here are the seven main uses for a colon. The
It seems quite simple: we use a full stop to end a sentence and a question mark to end a question. But sometimes it can be a bit tricky working out whether we are dealing with a question or statement. One category where writers often become confused is with indirect speech. If the sentence is
Measurements There is a very simple rule with abbreviations for metric measurements: you never use a full stop with them. mm, cm, m, km ml, L g, kg, kJ ha (I have to confess that I don’t know what Americans do, but, on the whole, Americans don’t use the metric system, so it probably isn’t
Abbreviations Abbreviations generally should be avoided in written English – it is always better to spell words out in full – but every now and again it is handy to use a shortened form of a common word. We might not have a lot of space (for example, in labelling columns, as in a calendar
Apostrophes and contractions Part of the reason that people find apostrophes confusing is that we use them in two different ways: to show possession (or, as I prefer to say, close association) between two things to show where letters have been left out of word or where it has been contracted (sometimes the contracted word