“Many older adults said they feel positively about their lives,” the New York Times reported recently. That sentence probably sounds as acceptable to you as it did to the Times editors. But what if ...

A teacher of English has sent in this query: “The participles of certain verbs function as adjectives in sentences. Many students find it difficult to distinguish between the adjectival and verbal ...

Before 2006, I never gave much thought to nominalizations — noun forms like “beauty” and “the scheduling” that at heart are really adjectives like “beautiful” or verbs like “to schedule.” I was ...

A reader from Coimbatore has sent in this query: “Is it possible for a verb to function as an adjective? Please explain it with some examples.” An adjective is a word that describes (modifies) a noun.

Psychologists, who breathe statistics as a salamander breathes fire, love to count things. They count and classify words to determine what books children should read, what children’s classics should ...

The March issue of The Walrus, Canada’s leading general-interest magazine, features an ad for a speech by a blond, smiling young man named Eric Termuende. His talk is entitled “Connecting the Dots on ...