Good news, kind of. I discovered a new sentence structure I hate. It’s a pattern I see often but only recently, while editing an article, realized it belongs in my writing hall of shame. Why would I ...

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study, scientists recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to ...

The hierarchical structure of sentences appears to be less important in human sentence processing than previously assumed, according to a new study of readers' eye movements. Readers seem to pay ...

Modifiers are describing phrases or clauses which support or tell more about your idea. Therefore, they have to be placed next to what they modify. Misplaced Modifers: Dangling modifiers are those ...

Our brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS ...

Most writers assume they write well. Yet most writers grapple with the reality of writing as a black box. That is, we know that writing works, but we’re a bit fuzzy on what makes readers grasp the ...

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts. The list -- intended for fiction writers but good for many of us -- is ...

“Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is.” You might have thought that only the pill that goes with that jingle creates relief. But science suggests the jingle’s wording itself elicits relief.