The way in which you put sentences together really changes the meaning and how clear and good your writing or speaking is.

“Avoid the passive voice” is a favorite maxim of writing teachers. But for young learners, exposure to passive construction—and other more complex sentences in spoken language—may help children ...

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 ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Years ago, a copy editor working on a reporter’s story changed some of the “whiches” to “thats” when they were being ...

Writers can use metaphors and similes to make a comparison and show the similarity between different things. But they can also deliberately use contrasting words and ideas to make us pay attention to ...

An independent clause is basically a complete sentence; it can stand on its own and make sense. An independent clause consists of a subject (e.g. “the dog”) and a verb (e.g. “barked”) creating a ...