Hello, it’s been a while, so I finally have a new article! Today, I’m exploring a language problem that is tricky to navigate: computer language assistants giving inaccurate advice. That is, when you have autocorrect or grammar assistant programs that flag things either unnecessarily or incorrectly.

I’ve compiled a short list of what I find to be the most common examples to help you avoid problems with this, so you can use language software tips more effectively.

What’s wrong with language assistant software?

Spellcheck and grammar assistants can be very handy, and I often use them for additional, final proof-reading checks – but I’m very careful about which corrections I accept. For example, this article is about 1,500 words long; I gave it one edit myself and ran it through Grammarly to receive 47 suggestions. Of these, 20 were actually specified “corrections”, and the others just language tips, which are of little interest to me. Of the 20 corrections, I found 5 useful, but only 1 was an objective error (a missing word). The remaining “corrections” were suggestions for commas or for verb or preposition changes. Considering I accepted 4 out of 19 of these, you can see the suggestions weren’t really “correct” for me.

This is about typical with what I find for my documents, though I am a professional writer and editor, so I’d imagine for others there may be a higher rate of useful corrections. If you can tell which ones to accept.

Every extra error I can identify is invaluable, but to get those corrections it’s essential that I’m able to identify how 75% of the suggestions aren’t appropriate. Mostly, the suggestions aren’t wrong, but are just unnecessary, and may slightly change my meaning or personal style. In the worst cases, they could actually introduce errors.

The problem is that language is an ever-changing and flexible thing, as we often discuss on here, whilst computer programs follow strict rules. It’s dangerous to rely on these too much, as they operate on a basis that all writing should be the same – that it should follow a particular, “correct” form. In its most extreme, this can strip writing of its intended effect or meaning.

Mostly, though, this is more of a sentence-level issue, where you have to consider whether or not the computer program’s tweaks are relevant – and consistent. To help keep you vigilant about the suggestions, here are 7 things that I notice often come up.

 1. Commas

By far the most common suggestion I get from computer language assistants is to add or remove commas. This is usually based on specific conjunction rules, pointing to situations where you should always or never have a comma alongside a conjunction. I disagree with using commas this way, as their particular use depends on how we can best present the information of any given sentence (as is true of all these points, actually).

For reference, I have a whole series of articles on commas, which you can find curated here. There is a running theme throughout that a comma’s main purpose is to aid with clarity. Software can’t necessarily decide that for you; sometimes, a reliance on specific structures will mean “correct” comma placement helps, but in most cases I would assess the accuracy of your commas based on your own intended meanings.

2. Prepositions

As with commas, computer software tends to try and fit preposition use into rigid rules, in this case based on expected conjugations. Anyone who has studied English will know, however, that the patterns for preposition use (and by association also particles from phrasal verbs) are terribly complex and often very specific.

Mostly, this is seen with suggestions that you change a preposition to a more appropriate one, or remove it. I frequently get told to correct “look on” to “look at”. This is a minor shift, but it’s telling that the software assumes “at” is always the most appropriate preposition for “look”. The problem with a correction like this is that “look at” may almost always be technically “correct” here, it’s not necessarily conveying the exact connection I want.

I also find these programs like to simplify longer or combined prepositions, such as changing “onto” to “on” or “into” to “in”, again stripping some nuance. Words such as “onto” and “into” exist to provide specific detail, which the computer, concerned only with correctness, does not necessarily appreciate.

3. Isolated Verb Conjugation

Certain structures seem to confuse computer software’s understanding of intended verb uses, and you may see suggestions for changing tenses or subject conjugation that don’t make sense in the wider context. One that I often encounter is where the program expects a particular type of structure to be associated with rules, and suggests a present tense verb, no matter what tense the rest of the document is in. This is more likely to occur where you have shorter, isolated sentences.

On the other hand, correction software can also get confused about subject conjugation when dealing with lists or longer sentences that separate the subject from the verb. Be particularly careful where you have noun phrases for subjects, and especially where you have multiple noun phrases, as this can make it hard to keep track of plurals. This is an area that can be tricky when writing and editing your own work, and computer programs aren’t necessarily any better at it than us!

4. Emphatic and Stylised Language

In general, autocorrect software is always looking to make your language more efficient and simpler, assuming simple is clearest. Whilst there is some merit in this as a starting point for editing, if followed too strictly it can restructure information you want presented in a specific way, and it may affect tone or emphasis.

Modern language use has gone towards an attitude that plain, simple language is best, but there is a time and place for varying from this. Computers cannot decide what those times and places are, so will simply tell you, for example, to remove extra adverbs or shorten long sentences.

You’ll see this in many different ways, but one of the most common is when language assistants suggest removing emphatic adverbs such as “still”, “just”, “really” and “very”. Sometimes these will be filler words that we can do without and sometimes they can completely change the emphasis of a sentence. Be careful to decide for yourself whether they are needed.

5. Dialogue Tags & Punctuation Styles

Computer language assistants sometimes make completely incorrect suggestions for specific bits of punctuation, such as dialogue tags (i.e. when using quote marks). A common example I find is when dealing with interruptions in dialogue, or listed items using quotes (in both cases, not using the expected full sentences enclosed by quotation marks). This is a matter of style which should be consistent within one document but may not easily be called correct or incorrect in general. For example:

• “I might interrupt some dialogue” – using dashes – “like this.”
• “Or you could also show an interruption,” with commas, “like this.”

Computer programs won’t necessarily see what you’re going for here, and can make some very strange suggestions, either to end or combine sentences or use different styles (such as replacing commas with dashes or vice versa).

It’s important in these cases to be aware of your style choices and stick to them.

6. Sentence Fragments & Adaptive Rules

There are times in writing where we reject typical rules to use grammatically incomplete sentences, often because they break rules, drawing attention to themselves. This is always going to depend on specific circumstances and personal nuance, and as such is always going to prove difficult for computers to master. I feel the software is actually getting better at appreciating this, and doesn’t always flag fragments, but for the most part if you venture from the rules, you will get warnings.

With sentence fragments in particular, this could lead to a variety of suggested solutions, including punctuation, verb, noun or preposition tweaks – all of which may detract from or completely change the intended meaning. Beware!

7. Vocabulary

Lastly, but most obviously, computer programs sometimes try to offer “better” words to improve your writing. This is not to be confused with correcting words, where you have a mistaken meaning, but is again a symptom of the rule-based system where certain types of language are considered to be clearer or more appropriate than others. Where software offers you words with similar meaning, I’d tread very carefully over exactly why it wants you to make a change. It may just be a case of the program trying to make language fit expected patterns. As with all the cases above, it can also mistake your intended meaning and try to change the sentence to fit its own ideas. Grammarly once told me to change “her behind” to “her hind legs”, which would’ve taken things in a very unusual direction.

The only good reason I can think of for automated synonym suggestions is where you might’ve used a particularly obscure or complex word that might be clearer simplified, but this is a personal choice to make that can depend on the context.

That’s my list for now, which I hope helps highlight areas for caution with computer language assistants. The software is useful and is definitely improving, but I do encourage you to keep questioning it, and there are plenty of other areas for caution I’m sure you’ve all encountered. Feel free to share your own experiences in the comments!

Season’s Greetings one and all! We’re reaching the end of the year and are into holiday season so I want to share a quick message for everyone, wishing you all the very best for the end of this year, and for the new year to come.

I also have my usual selection of Christmas-themed English learning articles to share if you want to make this educational!

Times are tough for a lot of people at the moment, so I hope you’ll have a chance to rest and find some goodness in the coming weeks; I’m personally always fond of seeing decorations as they show such creativity and light in the darkest days of the year. Take care of yourselves and your loved ones, and keep on going!

As I explained a short while ago, my books and this website have had a downward turn this year (you can read about it here), but I’m still here, and will be reviewing my next steps in early 2026. The main challenge is keeping the mailing list going, which has a rather expensive monthly cost – but I’ll either find a way to make it more affordable or make an effort to put out new material to justify it. I’ll be looking at it with fresh eyes in January, as for now I intend to take a short break!

Treat Yourself…

My free book series is in its last days at the moment, so if you haven’t seen it yet I still have a December treat available, as you can get Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English free until the end of the year!

And if you want some more from me to keep you occupied, here’s a fresh round-up of my seasonal articles from years past.

Seasonal English Learning Articles

• The Big List of Christmas Vocabulary
• Learn the Origins of 12 Christmas Words
• 6 Christmas Songs for Practising Listening
• Festive Christmas Language (Mixed Tenses Exercise)
• The Christmas Mess (Tenses Exercise)
• The Gift of Time (Tenses Exercise)
• The True Treasure of Christmas (Phrasal Verbs Exercise)
• Kate Skates at Christmas (Phrasal Verbs Exercise)
• Learn about the impact of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on the English language

Happy holidays everyone and may your New Year by filled with hope and positivity!

It’s time for the final instalment in my free book series, as explained in my recent blog post, and I’ve saved what I feel is the best for last, for the festive period! All December, I’m offering Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English absolutely free on this site.

This completes my series of free books, which I set up because I’ve had less time to produce new material and overall web traffic is slowing down. This is ahead of me reviewing where to take the site next in the New Year. I wanted to finish this year on a high point, with the book that I think demonstrates the most personal and unique of my content.

To help present the book, I’ve written another introduction and reflection on its origins and history.

What made Advanced Writing Skills special to me

After three books aimed at grammar and rules (even if they explored bending them), Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English was a change of direction into something more subjective: skill-based tips and matters of style. It was more personal than my other ELT books, as while it did require some broader research, it mostly draws on tips from my own experience as a writer and editor, as well as a teacher.

My intention was to help foreign learners develop skills in areas that many native English speakers also struggle with, or might not be aware of. I wanted to demonstrate a flexible approach to writing, while also exploring context and the evolution of language. A focus here was understanding the differences between essential rules that clarify understanding and patterns that merely provide consistency – as well as some considerations for where these cross over.

When I released this book, my grammar guides were selling very well, but this still felt like taking a chance, doing something more subjective. It proved immediately popular, though, and was labelled a #1 New Release on Amazon (see the image below!) before going on to become a bestseller in multiple categories. 

In fact, Advanced Writing Skills remains, to date, the quickest book I’ve released to turn a profit (at least, from any that had serious expenses – which excludes Word Order!). Soon after its release, I was flying back from abroad and on landing noticed a large number of orders had been placed, covering the editing costs all at once.

It also quickly gathered reviews from strangers, unlike the previous two books for which I spent many hours contacting reviewers with few results. And, most surprisingly, I was asked if it could be included on a university linguistics course!

Naturally, it was incredibly rewarding to have this more personal guide do so well.

Even now, Advanced Writing Skills remains one of my most consistently successful books; it hit a 10,000 sales milestone around its fifth anniversary, and even though sales have slowed down, it continues to sell as well as any of my other books. I always intended to follow it up with a couple of other books. One, presenting exercises which demonstrated these skills in practice, proved a lot harder to write than I expected. The second, aimed more at editing professionals, was intended to look at similar topics from a more technical, native speaker’s point of view. I hope to complete that one day.

For now, it’s my great pleasure to put Advanced Writing Skillson offer, so it might reach even more people, with this month of it available for free. I hope those of you who are new to the book find it useful, and those who are already familiar with it, please do share the offer!

For the next instalment in my free book series, explained in my recent blog post, for all of November, I’m offering everyone The English Tenses Exercise Book absolutely free.

In case you missed it before, I’m running this series of free books because I’ve had less time to produce new material and the site is getting less visitors anyway, so I wanted to keep giving something back.

Once again, I’ve prepared a introduction to the book and a reflection on its history below, to take a moment to share its story.

The Origins of The English Tenses Exercise Book

The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide was one of my main original ideas for this site, and as a topic I spent a lot of time developing and discussing, it felt only natural that it should have exercises to accompany it. Over the years, I’d managed to produce quite a few accompanying articles on this site, and I wanted to compile them, and more, into a systematic approach to testing the principles of the grammar guide.

One of the big things that encouraged me to do a full book like this was that my most popular article on this site, even now, was a rather basic future tenses exercise.

It took me a long time to get around to creating enough for a book, however, as a large part of the grammar guide’s point was to make more flexible use of the rules. Other than with really specific tense examples, then, and without wider context, I found it hard to come up with exercises where I wasn’t left considering alternative answers might also be appropriate.

Eventually, I devised a series of more regimented exercises which could test understanding of the rules without leaving answers open up to too much interpretation (although this remained a problem with the many different options available for the future tenses!). It was still tricky to come up with variations of these exercises, though, and in the end there was about a six years gap between me releasing the practical grammar guide and this exercise book!

Making the Book Unique

Like my grammar guides, which have my own personal twist on teaching points of flexible grammar, I wanted to make this different to other exercise books, as there are plenty of excellent ones out there. I also didn’t want to make it too complicated though, sticking to mostly gap-fill and matching exercises.

I’m not sure I was fully successful with creating something that original, but I attempted to make it more unique by (a) following a structure that closely accompanied the grammar guide and (b) adding in some more quirky prose-based exercises, with short stories and even a functioning bread recipe!

Otherwise, my aim was to create drills that were simple and engaging enough to provide a flowing set of exercises that would complement similar books. After all, I think you can never have too many exercises when trying to master a language!

The Challenges that Followed

The English Tenses Exercise Book is by far the longest of the books on this site, as I wanted to give a robust offering of different drills. This meant it took longer to make, and made it the most expensive book to produce, both in editing costs and printing costs. As an exercise book, it’s always been primarily popular in print and not eBook, too, making it less profitable overall.

Its release also, unfortunately, came at a time when the effectiveness of my advertising campaigns started to plummet.

As a result of all this, the Exercise Book was not a runaway success, and it took a lot of work to raise visibility and sales for it. The difficulty I had is partly responsible for me not managing to produce another English book since. It did turn a profit before too long, though, and has proved a hearty book that continues to sell about as well as the others on the site, it just never had a boom period like the other three. As of now, it’s sold about a quarter as many copies as the Practical Grammar Guide.

That remains a fairly significant number, still. For an exercise book, in a sea of other exercise books, I’m happy to have reached a few thousand people across the world, which certainly feels like enough to justify its existence! Hopefully it will continue to reach people over time, especially with this month’s free promotion.

Do have a look and let me know if you find it useful!

Hello from ELB! It has been a little while, so I want to address my increasingly irregular updates. It’s with great regret that over these past few months I’ve been unable to continue my monthly new articles, which I’d otherwise managed without fail for 12 years.

Unfortunately, I think it’s necessary to announce a change, and to admit I just can’t keep producing regular, effective ELT content right now. But I also want to offer some hope through all this, as the bulk of material I have managed to produce in those 12 years is still here, still freely available, and is going nowhere.

What’s changed?

I started ELB in 2013 with the intention of sharing the tips I was using in my teaching, and gradually expanded this to cover tips relating to my writing and editing work, as my professional focus drifted into these areas. As I’ve done less teaching and tutoring over the last 6 years or so, I’ve had less material to share, but I kept finding things to dip into because the site continued to be so popular, and I wanted to keep helping people who came looking for it.

Two things have made this much more difficult. The first is that my own professional circumstances have taken me into areas that feel much less relevant to ELT, so it’s harder for me to focus on material worth sharing here. The book market and online advertising overall are forever shifting and I’m sad to say I can no longer make a reliable income from my books – this year, I’m looking at sales as low as when I first turned to self-publishing full-time, about 8 years ago. Necessarily, I’ve had to adapt, and that’s taken me away from here (and I’d terribly aware of not having been able to produce the books I wanted to for this site).

Secondly, and far more discouragingly, though, my website traffic has seen a huge decline in the past year or so, especially over the past six months. This has coincided with the rise of reliance on AI in search engines, and in writing overall, so that search engines no longer send visitors to original articles, instead presenting their own (often erroneous) AI summaries that discourage onward website travel. And when people do click through to a website, the ones that top search engines are now more likely to be ones that recycle others’ content.

Whereas before it was good practice to release a monthly article to encourage more people to visit my website, now it feels increasingly unlikely that I’ll reach an audience with my writing. For 10 years, I was steadily growing an audience, reaching more people with time, but now it’s the opposite, with visitor numbers rapidly declining.

The situation is actually a lot worse than just reaching fewer people, though, because the proliferation of AI tools that scrape and copy existing writing without any legal recourse means that when I put effort into producing any original material, it’s likely to be stolen and reproduced by someone else rather than linked back to my own site. The AI summaries in search engines, after all, present this entire process in miniature.

So, while I appreciate there are still a lot of you reading, as it’s costing me more time and money for diminishing results, and especially when what I write here is likely to be stolen anyway, I’ve had to focus on other commitments. In fairness, not wanting to pile all this on the shifting landscape of the internet, this has converged to make it too hard for me to give this site the focus it needs.

What Does this Mean for ELB?

This may all sound rather bleak, but I have no intention of shutting this website down – it does still reach people. Right now, I’m seeing the same number of visitors in a week that I used to see in a day, which is much fewer, but not insignificant.

The website itself isn’t hugely expensive to keep up, though the newsletter is a bit of an outgoing, especially when I fail to send anything. I’m very grateful for my Patreon supporters, but this has never covered the costs of the site, and it’s probably only fair that I start considering shutting down the subscription platform, if I’m not producing more material.

But I do have plenty of existing material left to offer, and over the next few months I want to send out something more substantial to my loyal and eager readers, before I review where I’m at and come up with a fresh plan for 2026. So, on a more positive note…

Free Books for All!

I have four books available to help foreign learners, and I want them to reach as many people as possible while I still have some semblance of a platform to reach. Seeing as it’s become so hard to even get people to read the free articles on my website, for the next four months I will cycle through each book as a free gift, with a little introduction and retrospective on each.

Next month, I am going to offer the complete book of Word Order in English Sentences for free on the web store (possibly with a donation option, if anyone feels kind!).

I will follow this with the other books: The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide will be free in October, the Exercise Book in November, and Advanced Writing Skills in December.

I’ll announce each of these through the newsletter, so you’ll see it first here. If I can find time, I’ll also try and keep more of the archive messages going, to revisit old content, and following these releases I might dip into some broader retrospective looks at the archives, to curate the existing material. There’s so much still up on the site, I’d love for people to keep discovering it.

I’m not sure where I’ll take things after that, but it feels like a better use of my newsletter and my money to be sharing my books, even if for free, than to keep paying for my site and my email list with nothing new being shared.

It just feels like there’s so much greed, and hate, in the world at the moment, which is only growing as it actively suppresses what used to be a much freer and more generous online experience. My platform here might be diminishing, but as long as people are still visiting, I’d like ELB to be somewhere that continues to give a little hope, and a little help, to anyone who wanders across it.

Have a lovely day – and keep learning!

If you want to say something with fewer words in English, it’s often possible to choose more specific vocabulary. When it comes to choosing your verbs, this can impact entire phrases.

Today, I’m looking at a common issue in my fiction editing work, where we have verbs that may be accompanied by information like adverbs, prepositional phrases and even object phrases that do not add any additional detail. These can be easily trimmed if you’re working to a word count, or just want to be more efficient in your language use!

How Verbs Attract Extra Words

This can seem like a picky point, but we often see or hear verbs accompanied by information that essentially repeats something already conveyed by the action. For example, ‘shout loudly’ does not tell more than ‘shout’, as a shout is, by definition, loud. We often add such words quite instinctively, I suspect because we intend to express a specific detail without stopping to think about how we’ve already successfully expressed it. Though tricky to tackle when speaking, we can certainly look out for this when editing our writing!

The rich range of vocabulary in English gives us all sorts of nuanced choices for words – but this isn’t necessarily an advanced topic. Sometimes it is just a case of better understanding or paying attention to what verbs really mean. Through this consideration, we can shorten many verb phrases.

I’ve broken this down into three groups of example verbs that we can look out for to trim extra words: verbs which tell us the manner of what is done, verbs which tell us the direction of what is done and verbs which can tell us what is being used (i.e. implied objects). In all these cases, the extra details shown below aren’t incorrect as such, but can draw unwanted attention the verb and phrasing, which might distract your reader or listener by making them question if the additional detail is important. So, unless you want to be specifically emphatic, trimming these unnecessary words can help keep your language clean and clear.

Verbs Describing Manner

When choosing your verbs (as with all vocab!), there are typically simpler/general options and more specific, descriptive options. When you modify a general verb with an adverb, it’s often possible to instead use a different verb.

For example:

• run fast -> sprint
• talk quietly -> whisper
• liked a lot -> adored

While general verbs and adverbs have their own uses, what’s useful to recognise here is that more specific verbs are less likely to need such descriptors. If you already have a verb that describes a certain manner of action, extra description is not necessary.

For example:

• sprint [quickly]
• whisper [quietly]
• adored [a lot]

By definition, a sprint is fast, a whisper is quiet, and adoration is already extreme, so we don’t need these describing words. You can add such descriptors for emphasis, but it’s best to be aware of when and why you are doing this.

Verbs Describing Directions

Similarly, certain action verbs can by their nature express a directional aspect, making prepositions and prepositional phrases unnecessary. Such verbs might look like phrasal verbs, and fall into common usage, but they’re often just collocations. To look out for verbs that express directions, consider if the action would be unclear without a preposition.

For example:

• rise up
• crouch down
• climb up
• shout out
• dive under

This is not quite as simple as the describing verbs above, as the necessity for prepositions depends on how we’re connecting to a sentence, but without context, of all the verbs above except dive would give us the same information without the preposition. Rise must always go up and crouch down, and a shout always goes out (baring the artistic inward shout of thinking!). Without a specific context, climb generally means up, though we can also climb down. Dive, however, does not suggest a specific direction on its own – while it typically implies down, a dive can also go forward, sideways or up, or in this example under something.

Without objects and obstacles, verbs suggesting a direction can easily be simplified without prepositions. Unless you want to describe such actions in relation to something, e.g. to crouch under a table, we can mostly understand the directions of many verbs on their own.

Note, these extra prepositions don’t just apply to physical directions – more abstract verbs also can work on their own without prepositions, such as ‘add in/on’ = ‘add’.

Verbs Implying An Object

Lastly, there are verbs which by their nature tell us what is used to complete an action. People often add an object or indirect object to such verbs where it is unnecessary. This can be a trickier point to look out, but mostly I find these relate to actions that use body parts, perhaps because the verbs don’t obviously describing a body part, but typically don’t need the extra detail. For example:

• nod his head
• blink her eyes
• kick with his foot
• wave her hand
• shrug his shoulders

Unless there is something surprising or important about the object being used with such verbs, again it can sound strange or long-winded to add them. Again while this may sound picky, consider if you were to say ‘He hammered with a hammer.’ or ‘She spoke with her mouth.’ – someone who’s really paying attention could be distracted by such phrasing. Such verbs only need objects when the action is being specifically directed towards something other than the general meaning.

• She waved a flag.
• He kicked with the toe of his foot.
• She shrugged one shoulder.

Otherwise, I’d suggest keeping those verbs clean!

As I always say, this all depends on context and there are no absolutes in language, but I hope this gives some starting points for thinking about we can be more efficient in our phrasing of verbs, cutting out unnecessary words for a crisper, clearer meaning. And if you can think of other similar examples, feel free to share them in the comments below!

In English, we can indicate quoted text with either single quotes, ‘–’ or double quotes, “–”.

Typically it is expected that you use one style or the other, but they can also be combined. This can lead to some confusion as to exactly when you should use double or single quotation marks, and I see writers coming up with their own rules for what type of quotes should use which style.

So here is a brief guide to choosing between single and double quotation marks.

Should you use single or double quotation marks?

As a matter of style, there are only really two questions to answer to decide whether to use single or double quotation marks in your writing:

1. Is there an established style that already decides this?
2. If not, which style do you prefer?

The first question may be decided by a publishing house, company style, or even just a previous piece of writing which you want to be consistent with. You may even, for example, enter a correspondence and want to match the style of the person you are writing to, to be clear.

There is a regional consideration you might make, in that double quotations are more common in US English, and single quotations are more common in the UK English, but this is not a strict rule. My personal preference, in fact, is for double quotation marks, despite writing otherwise in UK English, for the simple reason that it feels more immediately clear to me, with less room for confusion with apostrophes.

If you don’t have an example to follow already, however, it really is your choice. Which looks better to you?

Once you have chosen a style, the main thing to bear in mind is to be consistent, and not switch between the two, otherwise the text can become confusing. This should be the same style throughout whatever you’re working on – a short story, an entire essay, an entire book.

That said, this website is actually a bad example of consistent quotation marks. Each article should have either single or double quotation marks, but some articles use one style and some the other. This is because the articles were all written separately and the choice varied depending on my mood on the day. I’d recommend not writing this way; I normally only write with double quotation marks, so I’m not sure why some articles here are different!

Anyway, once you have chosen a style, you may still need to use the other style – but there are particular rules for that.

How do you use both single and quotation marks?

Once you have decided upon whether to use single or double quotation marks, the simple rule to stick to is to always use that style for any quoted text, whether it is dialogue, a questionable or emphasised word or phrase, or a quote from writing (if indicated with quotation marks and not another style, e.g. italics). I sometimes see writers mixing this up and using single quotes for dialogue and double for quoted names, for example, which is inconsistent and should be avoided.

However, you do sometimes need to mix in both styles, for one particular reason: to show that something is quoted within another quote. In other words, when you have something quoted that includes another quote (such as dialogue reporting someone else’s direct dialogue). We switch styles to clearly indicate this, so whichever style you have for the text overall, the other style is used for quotes within a quote. For example, these are the two most correct forms:

• Billy said, ‘I heard mother call it a “carrot cake”.’ (single quotes, double within)
• Billy said, “I heard mother call it a ‘carrot cake’.” (double quotes, single within)

(A brief additional note: as ‘carrot cake’ is a phrase and not a full sentence, the full stop belongs outside the single quotes, but this is a regional style. In US English, punctuation typically comes inside quotation marks even if the punctuation is not part of the quoted phrase.)

With this in mind, you should easily be able to decide whether a particular quote within your text needs single or double quotation marks by sticking consistently to either of these two main rules:

• Single quotation marks, double within
• Double quotation marks, single within

This is one of the first style rules I establish for any document I am working on, and I suggest you do the same! I hope this helps you produce consistent quotation marks, and do let me know if you have any questions.

I often discuss breaking down sentence structure and word order to demonstrate how understanding sentence components helps provide flexibility with structure. You can use the full word order guide to help with this here.

Today, though, I’d like to discuss cases when it makes sense to choose a particular order based on a logical flow of information, where standard word order is maybe not the best choice, or reordering sentences could impact your intended meaning. This is not a question of grammar, but effective communication, and I’ll mostly focus on narrative timing to demonstrate this.

When “Correct” Sentence Structure is Problematic

A common issue I encounter in editing books is where something is described followed by information that would have been more effective coming first. This can be in descriptions of people and objects or the order of actions. It can also occur on a structural level, in paragraphs of chapters, but I’m going to be focusing on the sentence level here.

There are countless ways this can occur and it will always depend on the context (as does everything!), but most simply I see this as an issue where framing details come after the information they should frame. For example:

• There was an armchair in his living room, in his home, which was a castle.

There’s nothing essentially wrong with this sentence, except that we’re describing things in reverse order, from small to big, instead of setting the scene before placing things in it. The impact here is that it gives a rather scattered impression, with the reader having to reassess what they are seeing as they go (this works well in humour, but less effectively if you want to build a clear impression).

The key is to pay attention to what information you’d like someone to understand first to set a scene, before placing finer details in it. How important this is depends on what you are describing – essentially I’d warn that if there is anything a reader might find surprising, and you don’t want it to be a surprising twist (such as that castle detail), put it sooner.

In describing actions, the nuances of this can be more subtle. Particularly with shorter sentences, we don’t always need things to be in a simple linear order, as is clear by the fact that regular word order typically puts time phrases in a later position:

• She ate a cake after coming home.

It becomes more of an issue with longer sentences. When actions are described in detail before something else that already happened, it can create a narrative that feels like it’s jumping around. For example:

• He took the teabag out after brewing it for five minutes, once the kettle had boiled.

This sentence essentially tells us the events in reverse. It is grammatically correct and fairly clear, so I wouldn’t necessarily stop and say we must change it, but you can decide for yourself if a more logical sequence, presenting the action in the order that it happens, creates a better flow:

• Once the kettle had boiled, he brewed the tea for five minutes and took the teabag out.

This is a fairly innocuous example though. It matters more when you have details that could jar a reader out of the moment – again, if something might surprise them or might have helped establish the current scene. With events out of order, the timing itself may also become confusing:

• Sheila booked herself a cruise in the Pacific and enjoyed three months in the sun, away from everything, before settling down in a nice cottage in the countryside, after she retired.

Hopefully it’s clear here why the “after she retired” detail feels out of place at the end, as a detail that is tagged on, when in fact it is the detail that enables everything else. On its own, with this order, this sentence isn’t fully clear – did she retire before the cruise, or between the cruise and settling down in the cottage?

Again, I’d recommend presenting longer sentences in the order that events happen, so we can follow the action logically. And this is especially true, and apparent, when we include dialogue. With dialogue, we are creating a moment for the reader to experience, and if something is quoted followed by an action that preceded it, that moment is broken. For example:

• “Can I have some tea?” Winona asked, after she came into the room.

This is a backwards way of presenting the action as we’re already hearing the dialogue, picturing her saying it, only to then be shown her entering the room, which has already happened. If you want a reader to clearly picture a scene, it helps to keep things in order.

This doesn’t just apply to issues of clarity, though – mixing up the sequence of your sentences can affect tension, emphasis and other areas. There are reasons that we might specifically want to frame things differently (more on that below), but without one of those reasons, I’d suggest making things clearest for the reader by presenting actions in a logical order.

How to Keep Things Logical

There are two key tricks I’d look out for here in structuring your sentences to follow a logical/linear progression:

• Present details in a deliberate order, typically starting with the bigger picture and anything surprising or notable before getting into finer details.
• Present actions in the order that they occur, avoiding telling us about something that happened after we’ve already seen an action that followed it.

Two words you can look out for when considering the sequence of actions are “after” and “before” (and any similar phrases). For the most part, it makes sense to front-load adverbials that start with “after” (as these are events that came first) and to have adverbials that start with “before” later (as these are events that follow). The examples below illustrate this:

• After getting his car, he drove to the market. NOT He drove to the market after getting in his car.
• She bought the cheesecake in the market before she ate it all. NOT Before she ate it all, she bought the cheesecake in the market.

Again, though, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with these sentences on their own, but it’s a good practice to follow/be aware of for the times when it will matter.

When to Disregard Logical Order

As I said above, there are plenty of reasons we might not want to stick to a logical order. English sentence structure is, after all, flexible, and sentences can make sense in various orders. This is another case though where I would say whatever order you present your information, you should be aware of it, and have a reason for your sentence structure choices. This equally applies to both deviating from standard word order, where the time usually comes later (e.g. because we want to show a preceding event first), and in sticking to standard word order (e.g. because it is a short sentence or the sequence of events itself isn’t important/likely to cause confusion).

When we don’t use a linear order for presenting details or timed events, it’s usually because that information is less important and the order won’t affect understanding, or it’s because information presented out of sequence is more notable. Standard sentence order places time adverbials later in the sentence, which puts the emphasis on the active verb/subject, rather than the sequence of events itself. For example:

• She passed her driving test after only five lessons. (This puts more emphasis on the result, passing.)

Otherwise, giving us descriptive details or narrative sequences that don’t follow the expected, logical order, can also be good for deliberately adding emphasis or creating a surprise, which might be useful in creating either humour or tension. As with the castle example we started with, this can be a hallmark of absurdist humour:

• She rode to work instead of taking her car, but couldn’t find anywhere to stable her camel.

This sentence deliberately holds back the crucial detail, that she rode on a camel, to deliver it as a surprise. But if you merely wanted to paint a picture, where the point is anything but providing a surprise, it makes more sense to be clear:

• She rode her camel to work instead of her car, but the stables were full.

If in doubt, and you just want to be clear, consider what the most logical order is for a reader to receive the information you’re presenting, and how learning things in a different order will affect their understanding or reaction.