It’s simple. If you are trying to choose whether to use but or however, choose the bold but over the weak, wimpy however – every single time. If I could choose just one topic in grammar where I could way a magic wand and have my way, it is this: the issue of using but
Subordinating conjunctions: what they do and how they differ from coordinating conjunctions In my post on coordinating conjunctions, I explained how that group of conjunctions joins shorter sentences together in a way that balances the two original sentences, leaving them of equal importance in the new sentence. Subordinating conjunctions also join shorter sentences into longer
Coordinating conjunctions What do coordinating conjunctions do? Conjunctions, as a group, are like road junctions: they are where sentences join. Coordinating conjunctions, one of the two categories of conjunctions, resemble an intersection with a roundabout; they join the roads in a way where all roads are equal. No way in or out of the roundabout
We’ve now finished our look at adverbs and move to a new part of speech, conjunctions. But before we continue, let’s just look back at what we’ve covered so far. We’ve looked at nouns, which can be thought of as containers of meaning, and pronouns, which substitute for nouns so that we don’t always have
Conjunctive adverbs are one of the new categories of adverbs created by modern grammarians. Most of these words fit into the traditional grammar categories of adverbs of reason or degree. The recognition of conjunctive adverbs is the main reason I disagree with modern grammar! In modern grammar, conjunctive adverbs, sometimes called sentence connectors by other
The parts of speech is simply the term used to describe the group of functions that words carry out in speech and writing. One of the hardest things to cope with in English is the fact that most of the ‘rules’ aren’t black and white, and it can hard to pin exact answers to any
The elegant and under-appreciated semicolon has just two uses: instead of a comma, it separates long items in a list (but not in dot-point lists); it also can be used in place of (not as well as) and or but to join together two short sentences into a longer sentence. (In technical terms, a semicolon