Those who have received reviews from me, or have at least seen one of the many public reviews I have written, know that I strive to put a great deal of thought and effort into each and every one of them. I typically separate my reviews into three sections: Comments, Common and/or Recurring Technical Issues, and Other Notes. When I wrote reviews in the past, I repeated many of the Common and/or Recurring Technical Issues multiple times, continually writing out detailed descriptions of the problem(s) at hand. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing as how the entire spirit of that segment of the review is to highlight mistakes that occur frequently. It took quite a while to happen, but the idea finally struck me: why not create an item featuring these explanations already written and ready to go and then simply link to them from my reviews?

Using this journal as a supplement to my reviews was the original motivation to create it, but I think it can stand alone as a general reference as well. This will be a perpetual work in progress, at least for quite a while, since I will continue to add more entries as they come to mind. Needless to say, this is not a complete guide to the English language; you still need to learn the basics elsewhere. This is merely intended to assist those who possess otherwise sound mechanics with some of the more obscure and difficult-to-grasp rules of writing.

If I direct someone here from a review, then I will provide a direct link to the pertinent entry. However, for anyone who simply wishes to peruse the database for his or her own purposes, I have organized this to the best of my abilities. The entries are separated into two categories:

Basic Word Choice: This section contains examples of words that are commonly confused with one another. Some of them are homophones, while others are words with different pronunciations that have come to be used in the incorrect context.

General Grammar: This section will deal with punctuation, capitalization, and other broad issues.


Immediately below is an outline of the entries. Clicking on their titles from there will open them in a new browser window, and accessing them from the actual list farther below will open the entry in the current window. Use the Search box just above the entry list as an index; it will search the title and body of every entry for the word(s) you choose. The most recent five entries will display the date they were added.

Basic Word Choice
         "Affect vs. Effect" 
         "All right vs. Alright" 
         "Amount vs. Number" 
         "Capital vs. Capitol" 
         "Complement vs. Compliment" 
         "E.g. vs. I.e." 
         "Farther vs. Further" 
         "Fiancé vs. Fiancée" 
         "It’s vs. Its" 
         "Lay vs. Lie" 
         "Lead vs. Led" 
         "Loose vs. Lose" 
         "Peak vs. Peek vs. Pique" 
         "Prophecy vs. Prophesy" 
         "Than vs. Then" 
         "Their vs. There vs. They're" 
General Grammar
         "Appositives"  6/16/07
         "Clauses"  2/14/07
         "Colons"  6/17/07
         "Comma Splices and Fused Sentences" 
         "Compound Modifiers" 
         "Coordinate Adjectives" 
         "Dialogue" 
         "Discourse Markers and More" 
         "Double Predicates and Other Double Elements" 
         "Ellipses" 
         "Nominative and Objective Pronouns" 
         "Participial Phrases" 
         "Personal Titles" 
         "Relative Clauses"  2/25/07
         "Subjunctive Mood"  5/31/07

If you have suggestions for topics or have any other thoughts, then feel free to contact me.