Good news, kind of. I discovered a new sentence structure I hate. It’s a pattern I see often but only recently, while editing an article, realized it belongs in my writing hall of shame. Why would I ...

But what if the biggest giveaway that a text was written by AI isn’t a word, phrase, or punctuation mark, but a particular sentence structure instead? The idea that certain rhythms of sentences might ...

Researchers from MIT, Northeastern University, and Meta recently released a paper suggesting that large language models (LLMs) similar to those that power ChatGPT may sometimes prioritize sentence ...

“Avoid the passive voice” is a favorite maxim of writing teachers. But for young learners, exposure to passive construction—and other more complex sentences in spoken language—may help children ...

An independent clause is basically a complete sentence; it can stand on its own and make sense. An independent clause consists of a subject (e.g. “the dog”) and a verb (e.g. “barked”) creating a ...

Figure 1: Timing of syntactic processing following different strategies. The colored circles refer to the nodes of the syntactic structure that are built at the time point the word in the same color ...

The hierarchical structure of sentences appears to be less important in human sentence processing than previously assumed, according to a new study of readers' eye movements. Readers seem to pay ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Years ago, a copy editor working on a reporter’s story changed some of the “whiches” to “thats” when they were being ...