Call me Allan. Yeah, Allan. That’s A_L_L_A_N. Not Alan. Not Allen. Not Allyn. I’ve spent decades dealing with the misspelling of my given name. I have no idea why my parents spelled…
grammar and style
The skirmish between advertising and proper grammar
As a child raised on too much TV, I was exposed to a plethora of…
Over the river and through the woods: A practical guide to prepositions
Memorization: the bane of many students. I was no different, and my disdain for all…
A brief history of dashes
If you’ve perused the Leff blog before, you may have picked up on the fact…
Are fragments acceptable in professional writing? Surely not.
I recently attended a Professional Speechwriters Association writing workshop called “How to write EVERYTHING.” (It…
No-nonsense guide: How to use quotation marks
Punctuation can be a pain. The 2016 AP Stylebook dedicates 11 dense pages to explaining…
Bogus writing rules you should ditch
Most of us learned the basic rules of writing in elementary, middle, and high school…
Hyphens, em dashes, and en dashes—what’s the difference?
There’s no shame in acknowledging that you don’t understand the diverse and distinct uses of…