“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 ...

So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to avoid adverbs and adjectives (Zinsser 2006). Adjectives and adverbs sprinkle paper with unnecessary ...

MODIFIERS give us information about a noun or pronoun in a sentence. They are important because they help to paint the true picture of the information we seek to convey to our reader or listener. The ...

Aspiring science-fiction authors receive one piece of advice above all others: Forsake the adverb, the killer of prose. It’s terribly, awfully, horrendously important. But why? Really, adverbs aren’t ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. The “rules” under which hyphens are used to connect multiple modifiers, like “well(-)known man,” are varied and ...