A headline in the Sunday (March 28, 2010) Parade stopped me this morning.

A reader found fault with this sentence from a front-page story Sunday: 

The number of households in the state that depend on food stamps has increased 45 percent over the last two years. 

She thought the writer and editors had made an error in subject-verb agreement.

An online reader comment on a headline prompts this post in defense of a word.

Today's quiz is about word choice. Choose the better word in these five sentences. You might find a couple of sentences tricky. I hope you find the quiz enjoyable and educational. After all, that's the point.

Click here or on the question mark icon to begin. 

March 4 is National Grammar Day.

I ran across a story that used "an historic." This post is about why the article should be "a," not "an."

A new 10-question Grammar Guide Quiz is up.

Joel Schnoor, who lives in Apex, sent me a copy of his book, "I Laid an Egg on Aunt Ruth's Head." (Author House, 2009)

We used to have a saying on the copy desk: Don't follow the stylebook out the window. In other words, common sense should govern which style rules you enforce.

The Associated Press Stylebook is the guide we use for deciding how to handle some usage matters. We follow it -- mostly. Some of us love it, and some of us hate it. Some of us see it as a blunt instrument we can use to subdue crazed writers. And some folks see it as a rich source for parody. Those are the people behind the Fake AP Stylebook on Twitter. Warning: They use words that are decidedly not in the AP Stylebook but which can be heard from time to time in certain workplaces.

Marian Anders tells the truth when she writes, "Unless you want to be an English teacher, you only need to know the grammar necessary to write correctly -- for school, work and you personal life." That is the guiding principle of Anders' book, "My Dog Bites the English Teacher: Practical Grammar Made Quick and Easy"