What is the difference between the nouns start and beginning? The period will start in 15 minutes vs I can barely remember the beginning of the period Start has the sense of being a fixed point in time, while beginning could possibly refer to any time between the start and the halfway point
When should we capitalize the beginning of a quotation? Basically, I am somewhat confused when a quotation should be capitalized My understanding is that if a) one quotes the full original sentence and b) this quotation is set off by a colon, semi-colo
At the beginning of the century or in the beginning of the century? The beginning of the century is a period of time which is short compared to the century but rather long otherwise; Some people may use this phrase to mean the first decade or even longer I might say "At the beginning of the 20th Century women generally couldn't vote but by the end of World War II many nations had granted them this right"
Alternatives to then, next (at the beginning of the phrase) in . . . What is the nature of the items being enumerated with these words? What determines the order: is it chronology, a logical argument, a ranking in order of importance? How long is the description of each of them in the paper? All of these affect how you might introduce each point I don't necessarily read "Then" and "Next" as informal
What is a word that means truncate from the beginning? I am creating some software that has the concept of truncating a one-dimensional array from either the left or right end I'm happy using the word truncate to describe lopping off the rightmost end
suffixes - beginning is to prefix as end is to suffix as . . . The word "prefix" describes something affixed to the beginning of a word and the word "suffix" describes something affixed to the end of a word What is the analog of these for something affixed to or making up the middle of a word?
When do we need to put a comma after so at the beginning of a sentence? The comma looks too accidental and unpolished So again, the best simple rule-of-thumb is to avoid comma-after-so (indeed comma after any FANBOYS) at the beginning of a sentence, immediately following a semicolon, or immediately following a comma That will nearly always align you with great writers and editors