A lot of adults gave up on grammar long ago. They didn’t learn as much as they would have liked in school. Now there’s too much too learn. Amid a sea of gibberish about sentence-ending prepositions, ...

I’m a little fussy about past participles. Unjustifiably fussy. It may have to do with the fact that I married someone from small-town Massachusetts, where everything is “I have ate this” and “I ...

Last week we talked about how to look up past participles in your dictionary. Here's a condensed lesson: For any irregular verb, the past tense and past participle are listed right after the entry ...

I want to follow up on the topic of language evolution that I took up in my previous newsletter about how the word “satisfying” has taken on a new meaning among many of today’s kids. The bigger theme ...

To talk about something you did in the past, you're going to need the perfect ‎‎ tense. The perfect tense is made up of two parts. The first part is often the verb avoir ‎- ‎to have and the second ...