Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
QuickAndDirtyTips.com
Five-time winner of Best Education Podcast in the Podcast Awards. Grammar Girl provides short, friendly tips to improve your writing and feed your love of the English language. Whether English is your first language or your second language, these grammar, punctuation, style, and business tips will make you a better and more successful writer. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Memory, Aging, and the Lingering 'Anyways'
974. How does aging affect our ability to understand language? From the challenges of processing complex sentences to the resilience you get from a rich vocabulary, we look at how our language skills change over time. Plus, looking into why people say "anyways" led me to some interesting historical tidbits.
Mar 26
17 min
A nuclear win at the Oscars. CamelCase. One clo.
973. "Oppenheimer" leads us to wonder about the "nucular" pronunciation of "nuclear." And why do people have that second capital letter in the middle of MySpace, OutKast, and PowerPoint (and is it grammatically correct)?
Mar 19
16 min
From grunts to grammar. The Irish 'after doing.' The winning NGD poem!
972. How did humans evolve from grunting ancestors to masters of language and poetry? This week, we explore fascinating theories on the origins of human language, including the laugh-inducing Bow-Wow and Pooh-Pooh theories. We also delve into Irish-English calques for St. Patrick's Day (and in response to a question from a Grammarpaloozian) and celebrate Leslie F. Miller's winning limerick from the National Grammar Day contest.
Mar 12
13 min
Where did our language start?
971. Linguists have traced modern languages like English and Sanskrit back thousands of years to a single Proto-Indo-European source. This week, we explore their detective work and the debates around the origins of the ancestral tongue.
Mar 5
21 min
'Addictive' or 'addicting'? Types of nouns. Folley
970. We answer a listener question about the difference between "addictive" and "addicting," and then we look at how to write compound nouns: did you visit a coffeehouse or a coffee house?
Feb 27
14 min
Tracing the origins of Miami's new English. Why it's not a 'gumballs' machine. Embassy Sweets.
969. From "wolkenkratzer" in German to "flea market" in English, direct translations called calques show how languages borrow from each other. This week, we look at how these translations are changing English in Miami and Spanish in Louisiana. Plus, we look at the difference between "gumball machine" and "gumballs machine" and how it might explain Joe Alwyn's Tortured Man Chat.
Feb 20
19 min
Taylor Swift Doesn't Need Your Grammatical Approval. In Love. Foil Lump Surprise.
968. We explain why Taylor Swift's album title doesn't need an apostrophe and how the preposition "in" signals passion.
Feb 13
13 min
'A' versus 'an.' 'Larruping' rides again. Euonyms. Flavoring.
967. Should you say "a honor" or "an honor"? It's trickier than you think! We explore why articles depend on sounds and regional variations, the difference between "thee" and "thuh," and your stories about delicious phrasings.
Feb 6
12 min
From 'hwhat' to 'what': Tracing a letter's disappearing act. Barkhouse.
966. We explore the rise and fall of the letter H: Debates over its name ("haitch" or "aitch"?) and why a once-prestigious pronunciation like "hwhat" now seems old-fashioned.
Jan 30
17 min
The listener show! (canceled, think, lettuce, funnily, episode numbers, at about, mangos, musgos)
965. It's a listener question extravaganza! I answer your questions about "canceled," "another think/thing coming," zero plurals such as "fish," the way I reference verbs, episode numbers, "at about," mangos versus green peppers, and musgos.
Jan 23
19 min
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