Could. Could is an important auxiliary verb I could do that if I wanted to. And pigs could fly See verb.Could of

origins in Greek. Make sure criteria as a subject agrees with a plural verb. WRONG:
“That is the right criteria RIGHT Those are the right criteria See agreement.
Criterion. See criteria.
Cut, cut, cut. An irregular verb in its main, past tense, and past participle forms.

D
’d. The letter d with an apostrophe before it is used to form contractions of past tense
and other auxiliary verbs and pronouns: he had—he’d,” I would—I’d.” Avoid contractions informal, standard English writing. See also verb.
Dangling modi er. One very common problem in writing concerns adjectives,
adverbs, phrases, and clauses that are worded or located in sentences in such away that they do not have clear, or any, referents or antecedents—they dangle somewhere without a clear relationship to any other part of the sentence Lying in the sun, the day was clear In this example it is not clear who or what is lying in the sun—certainly not the day. You can detect problems like this in your writing only by rereading, checking, revising, and proofreading. You can solve such problems by putting the dangling words close to what they are talking about and by making sure that the relationship between that thing or person and the words describing it is clear and logical. Thus the sentence used in the example might become Lying in the sun, I enjoyed the clear day depending on what you intend to say. The point is to match clearly intention and expression.
Dash. The dash punctuation mark (—) is used to separate parts of a sentence that are more or less equivalent but that have no words to link or join them (that lack
conjunctions): The minister spoke of a book—the Bible—known to us all Here the dashes take the place of words like that is which could also be used to blend the concepts of book and Bible together. Clauses can also be joined by dashes The lecturer gave a speech—the audience listened with interest Again, the dashes stand for something like that is and indicate a sort of contraction, or elision, of the ideas or words in the sentence.
Since dashes are used where words might have been supplied to specify a relationship, there is always the risk that the dash will not clearly convey the nature of the relationship or the things linked. Moreover, the things dashes set o are usually interjected into a sentence rather than being integrated into it with connective words. By their nature, such interjections interrupt the ow of thought to some degree (and often to good e ect), and many of them can prove distracting. For these reasons, most style guides suggest restricted use of dashes.
Dashes can be typed as two hyphens with or without spaces around them or as any solid line longer than a hyphen. But using more than two hyphens is not preferred in
standard English.

Data. Although data is a plural form of the Latin datum and since the singular is not used in standard English except in the most erudite writing, this plural noun has come to be used quite commonly as a singular, especially when the topic is large quantities of information seen as a collection The data on this subject is copious and convincing Many academic settings would nd this example substandard, but singular uses of data have spread with the growth of computers and information science.
Dates. There are several systems for expressing dates in writing. Which you use in your writing depends on the standards set in the community in which you are expressing yourself or by the audience to which you are addressing yourself.
The most commonly used date system is month, day, year. The full name of the month comes before the number of the day, a comma follows, and then comes the numbers of the year March 23, 1987.” The number of the year is followed by a comma if the sentence continues or by any other punctuation mark that is appropriate at that point in the sentence On March 23, 1987, the contract took e ect. But work began only on March 28, much later than anticipated. The completion date was March 22, 1999.” The numbers are in gures, and they are not followed by letters to indicate that they are ordinal numbers, even though the date in the example is frequently pronounced as the “twenty-third of March WRONG March 23rd,
1987.”
If the day of the week is speci ed in this style, it can come before the date and is followed by a comma Friday, March 23, 1987” (because the day of the week and the numerical date are seen to be in apposition, as are the numerical date and the year see appositive). The day of the week following the date is preceded by a comma and usually adds an article, since the following day is seen as an afterthought or
interjection: Maya Friday No comma is needed if month and year alone are recorded It happened in March An alternate system avoids the commas by placing the day number before the month and year “23 March 1987.” All the other rules noted above apply to this system, which is common in the military and other styles Friday, 23 March Informal English it is preferred to spell out dates in one of the systems noted above. However, our digitized society more and more commonly also expresses dates in numbers alone “5/23/87,” “5-23-87,” or some variant on these. Follow the style set or likely to be least confusing for the circumstances in which you are writing. If your audience includes British or European readers or writers, be aware that numerical notations of dates in Europe (and the United Kingdom) usually reverse the month and day from American usage “23/5/87.” In the now-boring example, there is no question that March 23 is meant because “23” can only be a day. But a
European who writes “11/12/1992” probably means December 11,” while an

American who wrote the same numbers would mean November 12.” See A.D., B.C.,
and century.
Declension. The pattern of inflection—changes in word forms tore ect changed grammatical roles—for nouns and pronouns is called declension In nouns and pronouns, declensions list patterns of changes in case, gender, and number, pronouns can also be in ected (and therefore declined) in person. The declension for the personal pronoun in the nominative case is I you he, she, it we you they.”

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