Sometime ago, a student in Cambodia preparing for a special English-language scholarship test sent me an e-mail expressing puzzlement over these two sentences: "Particularly unfortunate was my failure ...

In English, our sentences usually operate using a similar pattern: subject, verb, then object. The nice part about this type of structure is that it lets your reader easily know who is doing the ...

On several occasions these past four years, I have pointed out that the pronoun “they” rather than “them” is the correct form of the subject complement in this inverted sentence: “The winners of the ...

IN last week's column, we looked at how inverted sentences allow us to abandon the normal subject-verb-complement (S-V/C) sequence so we can deliver the verb or its complement wherever we feel it can ...

In last week’s column, I pointed out that the pronoun “they” rather than “them” is the correct form of the subject complement in this inverted sentence: “The winners of the contests were (they, them).