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.

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 ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Forming a plural is pretty easy, right? You just add an “s” to something. Unless, of course, it’s a word that already ends ...

Of all the grammar concepts we have, "plural" seems to be one of the most straightforward. You got one thing? It's singular. Got more than one thing? It's plural. But alas, language is always less ...

Sometimes a noun looks like it should be plural when it isn’t. Chances are that this noun is called a mass noun. Mass nouns are nouns that, by their very nature, are plural. These are also called ...

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 ...