A recent headline from the Los Angeles Times, “Teens plotting attacks tend to tip their hand,” highlights a particularly difficult grammar problem. Do plural teens really share a singular hand? No.

See anything wrong with that sentence? Most people probably don’t, but there is a problem with it and, for me, the problem is eye-opening. Here’s the issue: If you want to be as proper and correct as ...

English typically uses a strict SUBJECT VERB OBJECT (SVO) word order in simple sentences, as in Students (S) read (V) books (O). This SVO word order becomes altered in many other English sentence ...