Word Differences

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)

You've probably typed "mine as well" at some point without thinking twice about it. Maybe you caught it, maybe you didn't. The question of mine as well or might as well trips up more writers than you'd expect, and the mix-up isn't really about carelessness — it's about how English sounds when people actually talk. Here's the short version: "might as well" is correct almost … [Read more...] about Mine as Well or Might as Well: The Real Reason You Mix Them Up