About



Rebecca A. Coates has hacked through jungles of wordiness with her machete and killed dangling participles with her bare hands. Is she a superhero? Quite possibly. It’s safe to say no normal person is this interested in grammar.

I’m a writer and freelance editor, a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at SFU, and a member of the Editors’ Association of Canada. My writing has appeared in skirt quarterly and the anthology emerge 15, as well as an upcoming Baba Yaga anthology to be published by World Weaver Press. To learn about my editing experience, visit my LinkedIn profile. I live in Vancouver, because too much sunshine makes me burst into flames.

Cosmic Origins


This blog owes a large debt to the brilliant Karen Elizabeth Gordon, author of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, The New Well-Tempered Sentence, and other whimsical and funny books on grammar and punctuation. It was also inspired by my Grade 9 English teacher, Mr. Recker, whose worksheets included sentences like “The wind gusted strongly, and dandruff soon filled the driveway.”

You and Whose Dictionary?


My main references are The Chicago Manual of Style and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. I live in Canada, so my blog is slanted towards Canadian usage; however, I usually include US and British usage as well, since Canadian style tends to be an unholy mixture of the two.

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