Sometime ago, a student in Cambodia preparing for a special English-language scholarship test sent me an e-mail expressing puzzlement over these two sentences: "Particularly unfortunate was my failure ...

On several occasions these past four years, I have pointed out that the pronoun “they” rather than “them” is the correct form of the subject complement in this inverted sentence: “The winners of the ...

In English, our sentences usually operate using a similar pattern: subject, verb, then object. The nice part about this type of structure is that it lets your reader easily know who is doing the ...

One of the pleasures of writing is being able to share not only information and ideas, but also one's feelings. But those are ...

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 ...

In last week’s column, I pointed out that the pronoun “they” rather than “them” is the correct form of the subject complement in this inverted sentence: “The winners of the contests were (they, them).