Ethan Parker

Requestor or requester? Both are correct, and both mean the same thing: a person or organization that makes a request. Write either one and no dictionary will call you wrong. Still, one is the everyday spelling, and the other mostly lives inside forms, systems, and contracts where somebody already made the call. Here's the whole decision in a sentence. Use requester unless … [Read more...] about Requestor or Requester? 4 Myths to Stop Believing

Simile vs. metaphor is one of those topics where the school rule is almost right, which is what makes it annoying. Simile gets "like." Metaphor gets "is." "The train was like a sauna" versus "The train was a sauna." Done, right? Mostly. A few sentences slip through that rule, though, and teachers love putting them on tests. The ten-second test Find the two things being … [Read more...] about Simile vs Metaphor: Tell Them Apart in 10 Seconds

You're typing up a bake sale sign, a recipe, or a caption for a trip to the California coast, and your fingers stall. Carmel or caramel? One is a golden-brown sugar treat. The other is a place, and sometimes a person. Pick the wrong one and your brownies end up named after a seaside town, which is funny exactly once. The rule fits in a sentence. If you can eat it, pour it, … [Read more...] about Carmel or Caramel: 7 Real Cases, 1 Simple Rule

Leaped or leapt? If you've stalled mid-sentence over it, here's the relief: both are correct past forms of leap, and both work as the participle too. Neither is a typo, and unless a house style says otherwise, no editor will circle either one. For American writing, though, one is the easier default, and settling on it now saves you from second-guessing every jump, spike, and … [Read more...] about Leaped or Leapt for Americans: 1 Default, 4 Mistakes 

Type "how to" into a sentence and you hit a small fork: hyphen or no hyphen, and if you mean more than one, an s or an apostrophe. The how-to vs. how-tos question looks like a coin toss, but it isn't. Each spelling serves a different job, and once you know which job you've given it, the spelling settles itself. Here's the whole system in one sentence: This how-to shows how … [Read more...] about How-To vs. How-Tos: Hyphen, Apostrophe, or Neither? (3 Jobs)