Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to ...

When you woke up this morning, you probably did at least five things before you left your home for school or work. Maybe you ate breakfast, took a shower, brushed your teeth, put on your clothes, and ...

It’s a billboard custom-tailored to grammar buffs. “Every day we help people get back to their everyday,” proclaims the ad for Keck Medical Center of USC. In that single sentence, the copy writer does ...

Adverbs are of different types. Among such are adverbs of manner (like smoothly, awkwardly and loudly) and those of time (today, yesterday and now). But there is a type not commonly taught: the one ...

Aspiring science-fiction authors receive one piece of advice above all others: Forsake the adverb, the killer of prose. It’s terribly, awfully, horrendously important. But why? Really, adverbs aren’t ...