Letters represent sounds. Words are built from letters. A group of words makes a phrase. Add a subject and verb, and you have a clause. If that clause expresses a complete thought, we call it a ...

Good news, kind of. I discovered a new sentence structure I hate. It’s a pattern I see often but only recently, while editing an article, realized it belongs in my writing hall of shame. Why would I ...

Researchers from MIT, Northeastern University, and Meta recently released a paper suggesting that large language models (LLMs) similar to those that power ChatGPT may sometimes prioritize sentence ...

But what if the biggest giveaway that a text was written by AI isn’t a word, phrase, or punctuation mark, but a particular sentence structure instead? The idea that certain rhythms of sentences might ...

“Avoid the passive voice” is a favorite maxim of writing teachers. But for young learners, exposure to passive construction—and other more complex sentences in spoken language—may help children ...

Writers choose and build different types of sentences carefully. There are three main types of sentence structure - simple close simple sentenceA sentence containing one clause made up of a subject ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Years ago, a copy editor working on a reporter’s story changed some of the “whiches” to “thats” when they were being ...