Many people are deeply insecure about the difference between who and whom, resulting in hypercorrect insertions of whom where it doesn't belong. So it's interesting to find a writer using whom in the correct case while simultaneously falling into a different error, one that my intuition tells me should be much easier for native speakers to spot.

I've written before about how preparation material for the SAT writing section sometimes presents an over-simplified view of grammar that can get you into linguistic trouble. Here's another case in point:

The following question appears in a Kaplan practice SAT (12 Practice Tests for the SAT 2009 Edition, p. 589):

Although talent may be a crucial element on the road to fame, it is difficult to succeed without a highly developed work ethic.

One of my recurring frustrations with the way grammar is taught in the K-12 world is that by clinging so tenaciously to books that have not seen any real innovations in syntactic theory since the nineteenth century, teachers wind up with no explanation for many phenomena that occur all the time.

A teacher sent me an email with the following question:

I've tried looking this up in every grammar guide I can find, but I haven't found the answer. Consider these two sentences:

I bought a car to drive myself to work.
I bought an alarm clock to wake me in the morning.

Hasty generalizations about grammar quickly get you into trouble. As a case in point, consider the difference between subject-verb agreement and pronoun-antecedent agreement. Both require, in the core cases, attention to the number (singular or plural) of a particular noun phrase. At the same time, there are important differences, and treating the two as identical can lead to significant problems.

A few days ago, a Language Log post mentioned an old Onion article about reverting the grammatical rules of English to something roughly equivalent to Late Old English. It's satire of course (something that seems to have gone over some people's heads), and the article doesn't actually follow a consistent practice.

In the previous section, I briefly introduced you to the modal auxiliaries when I argued that will does not constitute a separate tense marker. To understand the function of modal auxiliaries, you need to know two related terms: modality and mood.

Modality refers to a set of related concepts primarily involving the attitude of the speaker of a sentence towards the reality of a particular assertion. What exactly that means is complicated and best illustrated with an example:

(12a) Tad programs computers for a living.

There are a small number of modal verbs, and they display distinct features that set them apart from other auxiliary verbs.

I am something of a creature of habit, and therefore will stick to the same blogs for a long time. Lately though, I've been trying to expand my reading, and so I've been following links from the sites I frequent to language-oriented sites that I haven't visited before.

In the process, I have discovered

1) Language Log really needs to update their links. At least half the sites on their sidebar are defunct.

Almost everyone was taught in school to avoid using the passive voice. Fewer know how to identify the passive voice, but I'm going to assume for the moment that you are part of the elite who can and ask you to do a little grammatical analysis with me.

[to be added]