Here’s something I bet you never knew was controversial: “I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me.” Yes, language sticklers might have a problem with that, even though you need an advanced ...

I saw you working hard. I appreciate you working hard. At a glance, these sentences seem grammatically identical. But in fact, the grammar of the second one is wildly ...

If you ever knew what a “participle” was, you may have forgotten. Same with the word “gerund.” And if you ever heard the term “fused participle,” you probably zoned out completely. The concept of a ...

I saw you working hard. I appreciate you working hard.

We will come to sodomy in a moment. To stagger together through today's column about grammatical possessiveness, you and I must agree on the difference between a gerund and a participle. Take the word ...

"You really do make me feel like a nuisance or perhaps an eccentric when you decline to answer me regarding the subject of fused participles," a reader wrote in February. I didn't mean to - it was ...

My friend Anne wrote recently to ask about a pair of sentences she was puzzling over. She wanted to know which of the following is right: "Me seeing that letter is important" or "My seeing that letter ...

Last week we talked about participles, which are verbs that work like adjectives. Gerunds are also based on verbs, but they work like nouns. Gerunds have only one form, and it looks exactly like the ...