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Email misjudgments can land people in jail. Just ask James A. Brown, ex-Merrill Lynch executive who wrote in an email that Enron had “promised” that Merrill would get their money back in a suspicious Enron deal involving barges off the coast of Nigeria. According to the Wall Street Journal (10/23/10) “a possible turning point came […]

Some common phrases are hard to tell apart. Here is a brief guide to a few common trouble-makers. Compared To vs. Compared With When making an analogy to something of an entirely different class, use compare to. He compared leading a company through recessionary times to steering an ocean liner through a storm. Compared to

Here are a few more pairs of commonly confused words. You will make fewer, lesser mistakes if you learn them well. Enormousness vs. Enormity Enormousness always refers to something that is a huge size. The enormousness of the elephant amazed him. The enormousness of the portions she served made it impossible for him to eat

In the word penultimate, the prefix pen means almost. Thus, penultimate means “almost ultimate,” specifically, next to last. Ultimate is the last; it often has the positive connotation of also being the best. “I was in the penultimate place in the race!” seems like an achievement unless you know that only two people were racing.

I wish I could offer attribution to these two punctuation parables but alas I received them unsigned. Nevertheless, they illustrate the important function that punctuation plays in telling the reader how to parse the words on the page. Punctuation both paces and parses, instructing the reader about when to stop (for periods, question marks, and