Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to ...

MODIFIERS give us information about a noun or pronoun in a sentence. They are important because they help to paint the true picture of the information we seek to convey to our reader or listener. The ...

James J. Kilpatrick, on vacation this week, shares a column published in March 2004: Among the most readable publications in the field of law is Supreme Court History, published every four months by ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. The “rules” under which hyphens are used to connect multiple modifiers, like “well(-)known man,” are varied and ...

Modifiers are elements of enhancing the meaning and beauty of constructions. However, when modifiers are not properly handled, they constitute fertile grounds for ambiguity and miscommunication.