More and more frequently, polished writing raises suspicion. The everyday techniques taught in grammar school are being misread as AI, reshaping how people judge what sounds human.
'The apostrophe's chequered history poses enormous challenges not only for learners of English, but clearly for native speakers too'. Photo: Alamy What did the apostrophe ever do to deserve this? To ...
English lessons shouldn’t be an immigration test – why the UK’s new policy risks deepening exclusion
What happens when learning English stops being a bridge into society and starts to feel like a test of belonging you can fail? That is the question raised by the the UK government’s proposed new ...
“Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades,” a report by the language-learning website Babbel proclaimed in May. (HT Illustration: Puneet Kumar) Their ...
In the 3rd century BCE, the Greeks wrote without any spaces, punctuations or distinction between capital letters or lowercase. To the modern eye this would look like undecipherable code: just capital ...
To truly realise NEP’s vision, a two language policy of English + Mother Tongue is better than GOI’s hasty mother-tongue directive. Without English, children will be at a disadvantage in higher ...
LONDON — Like the fissionable atom, punctuation marks are wee items capable of causing a tremendous release of energy. Passionate disagreement over the use of exclamation points is so familiar that a ...
Is nothing sacred anymore? Now we can’t even text — text, the thing millennials practically invented on T9 keyboards — without being called out by Gen Z. The generation who banned skinny jeans and ...
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...
The first reported use of the semicolon was in the essay "De Aetna," pictured in part here, by Pietro Bembo and published by Aldus Manutius in the 1490s. Aldus Manutius, Pietro Bembo The semicolon has ...
Punctuation plays a vital role in shaping how writing is understood. From full stops to semicolons, each mark helps guide meaning, structure, and emotion in a sentence. Misuse can lead to confusion, ...
"Rend your cheeks and rub ashes into your hair," said The Spectator, for the semicolon, that "most elegant, elusive of punctuation marks", is all but dead. Use of the semicolon (in lists, or to join ...
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