If you’ve had to homeschool any small people lately – or even if you’re just connected to some parents on social media – you’ve likely been confronted by the baffling phrase “fronted adverbial”.

NARRATOR: An 'adverbial' tells us more about what happened. So here, 'the man hammered the rock, 'carefully''. The adverbial tells us more about how you hammered the rock. Carefully. ROCK: He wasn't ...

Recently, I mentioned in a column that adverbs aren’t just those “ly” words that modify verbs. They’re a much larger group, including words that answer the questions “when,” “where” and “in what ...

“I don’t stay up nights worrying,” said John Lennon in 1965. “Summers I used to cover Missouri,” wrote Thornton Wilder in 1934. “I went over there afternoons,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in 1929. Why do ...

Baltimore Sun copy editor extraordinaire John McIntyre uses the term “dog-whistle editing” to refer to tiny editing issues that only copy editors notice (and perhaps only copy editors care about).