Have you ever felt unsure if your writing sounds natural enough or matches human style in todays tech-heavy space?

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 ...

We often focus on choosing the right words when we write—but how often do we think about punctuation? These small symbols—dots, commas, dashes, and more—do more than decorate our sentences. They guide ...

In a recent study published in Communications Psychology, researchers from NYU led by Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NYU Tandon and Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine Adeen ...

“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 ...

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study, scientists recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to ...

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 ...

Our brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS ...

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 ...