Mignon Fogarty

1 month ago | quickanddirtytips.com | Mignon Fogarty

“Epitome” is one of those words whose pronunciation can mess you up if you learned it from reading instead of from hearing people say it. The word is spelled E-P-I-T-O-M-E, and a lot of young readers end up thinking it’s pronounced “epi-tome” instead of “epi-tuh-mee” because a lot of the other words that start with E-P-I are pronounced that way: “epicenter,” “epidemic,” “epidermis,” and so on. And a lot of these people don’t realize their mistake until years and years later.

2 months ago | quickanddirtytips.com | Mignon Fogarty

Have you ever wondered why we have two past tense forms of the verb “to light”? Should you say, “Squiggly lit the candles,” or “Squiggly lighted the candles”? Maybe you’ve even wondered whether one is wrong. “Lighted” sounds kind of weird in that sentence, right? “Squiggly lighted the candles?”‘Light’ has two past tense forms: ‘lit’ and ‘lighted’Well, both words are correct. “Light” is one of those rare English words that has two acceptable past-tense forms.

2 months ago | quickanddirtytips.com | Mignon Fogarty

Today, we’ll talk about words you should never use and words you should always avoid — or something like that. As many of you know, before I was Grammar Girl, I was a science and technology writer. Even as an undergrad, my instructors said I was especially good at that kind of writing. And my secret was that I hedged everything I wrote.

Feb 24, 2025 | quickanddirtytips.com | Mignon Fogarty

One of my favorite parts of the Grammarpalooza bonus interviews that supporters get is the guests’  book recommendations. Ghostwriting expert Dan Gerstein provided us with three particularly good recommendations that unfortunately, didn’t make it into the podcast — a rare event that I’ve tried to rectify by posting them here.

Jan 7, 2025 | quickanddirtytips.com | Mignon Fogarty

There’s been a grammar controversy bubbling up from the new movie “Wicked,” which is an adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked,” which was loosely based on the 1995 novel “Wicked” by Gregory Maguire, which was inspired by the 1939 movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” which was based on the 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum. That’s a lot of media properties!Is ‘The Wizard and I’ grammatically correct?