The Hopper Guy has 30 years’ editing experience and a passion for precise language. Click the blue headline to see the whole post.
Diseases are named after their discoverers, but there is not a possessive. Alzheimer disease was discovered by Alzheimer, not suffered by him. So it is not Alzheimer's disease. Lou Gehrig…
People are "aged" a certain time. Someone is aged 21. Or you study happiness in children aged 8-10. Not "ages."
Math symbols get a space on either side. Math symbols are words. "=" equals the word equals. Thus, as if the whole word were there, a space would be on…
Similar to the previous entry: "since" refers to time. I have been up since seven this morning. If you want to start a sentence with a phrase that justifies what…
I recommend that you use the word "because" instead of the word "as" in phrases suggesting causality, such as "this will make us rich as it involves winning the lottery."…
Adverbs (words ending in -ly) almost never need to be hyphenated. This is a continually nagging problem in my text-editing work.
When two words combined define another word, they need a hyphen. They form one object-defining word.
If you "try and" understand it, you understand it. You can "try to" understand it. But if you succeed, then the trying is over.
And you can’t yell opinions in a crowded laboratory. You have to be aware of the qualitative assumption of your words. I recently edited a text where the author wrote,…
Increasingly, science journals are including in their instructions to omit "claims of primacy." This means phrases like "Ours is the first study to . . . " or "This is…