A few weeks ago, I taught two grammar seminars to aspiring novelists at the California Crime Writers Conference in Pasadena. The first session was all about the little stuff: lay and lie, commas, and ...

Nonessential words and phrases are elements of a sentence which do not contain information essential to the meaning of the sentence as a whole. Jan, the second of three children, always feels left out ...

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 ...