linguistlaura

I've just finished reading a book called 'Statistics without tears' by Derek Rowntree. It's a basic tutorial on statistical ...

One of my favourite writers is Justin Myers, who among other things writes The Guyliner. He reviews the Guardian Blind Date every week and I...

Trump (who I don't blog about much because I don't think it's helpful to criticise his poor command of language when he is so un...

One other thing I've noticed in student essays much more this time than previously is the use of likely . Here is the relevant use: Th...

I am currently mired in marking. As you know, I keep note of which mistakes are currently popular. One that I spotted recently was a sort of...

For those that don't know, the Oxford comma (or serial comma) is the comma that can come before 'and' in a list. I was taugh...

I went to a talk by Steven Pinker to promote his book, The Sense of Style . It was held at the Royal Institution, which is a science institu...

In the Guardian , ages ago now, Stephen Poole defended 'basically' against the charges  brought against it by Harris Academy in Upp...

Michael Gove has been the subject of this blog in the past . These days, he's no longer Education bod and is now Lord Chancellor, if you...

I teach, among other things, first-year syntax seminars. I've found that this year's cohort are pretty good at knowing the basic par...

Crikey. This Guardian article seems designed to elicit spluttering apoplexy. I think the author must be trolling. Nevertheless, I shall con...

Associated Press caused a twitter hoo-ha when they mistakenly led a lot of their followers to think that there had been yet another air cra...

This story recently appeared in the Guardian newspaper, about a schoolboy who bullied Tesco into changing some 'ungrammatical' word...

There's an interesting blog called ' Ten hundred words of science ', in which people try to explain their research using only t...

Twitter has a search bar thing and in it, it says "enter a @name or username". Now, I've been pronouncing @name as "at na...

I get occasional spam comments on my post about spam comments. I got this one today: I'm glad to know that Mary is in position to suppor...

I finished my PhD thesis today. I'm not submitting until Friday, but I needed to send it off to my super-helpful and kind friend so she ...

I'm submitting my thesis next Friday. At least, that's the plan. It's going to be a PhD-heavy time until then, so I won't be...

Part of the reason why I was so busy a couple of weeks ago is that I had a job interview, and I got it! I'll be starting at the Universi...

I've just finished reading the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. It was all right, not great literature but a fun enough read. Od...