I recently fielded questions about two subject-verb agreement errors that readers noticed in the media. One was heard on an NPR program. The other was committed by, um, a columnist who should have ...

The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house? Even after all my years of editing, I can still get tripped up trying to make verbs agree with collective ...

Some sneaky words out there look like plurals but take a singular verb. "Whereabouts" is one of those words, and here's an example from Monday's front page: Gadhafi’s defenders quickly melted away as ...

Hello, I’m Miss Williams and today we’re going to be looking at how we turn a word into a plural. But what is a plural? A plural is when you take a singular word and you add one or more letters to ...

The word “data” is plural, because its singular is “datum,” meaning a tiny bit of information, so small it’s no use dividing it further. Datum is one of the -um nouns in Latin that changes its ending ...