Tag: grammar
member name: John L.
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June 13, 2008 07:10 AM EDT --
You're just writing along, trying to meet your deadline. You certainly don't mean to hurt anyone. But then, without even thinking about it, you've done it... you've dangled a participle. . . .
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June 13, 2008 10:55 PM EDT --
In this post we're going to explore something you may use all the time in your writing—probably without even knowing it. I'm talking about the absolute phrase .
Basically, an absolute . . .
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June 22, 2008 02:00 AM EDT --
You probably know that if you accidentally type, say, aobut or Febuary in a Word document, squiggly little red underlining will alert you to your mistake. Then you just select the offending word and . . .
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July 28, 2008 12:44 AM EDT --
German may be a tough language to learn, but they did make it easy on us in one aspect: all nouns are capitalized. You never have to beat your Brain against your Skull wondering whether this Word or that . . .
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June 13, 2008 11:00 PM EDT --
Passive Resistance
In this post we'll begin to examine the dreaded critiquing mark of passive .
"Passive-ness" has received excessive and perhaps undue scrutiny in the . . .
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June 13, 2008 07:18 AM EDT --
In Part I we explored dangling participles . Recall that a participle is a verb form that acts like an adjective , and a dangling participle describes a noun which is not in the sentence . Can you . . .
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June 13, 2008 01:44 PM EDT --
My previous posts taught how to correct dangling participles. This time we'll look at some other common errors that crop up with participial phrases.
Remember our device for checking whether a . . .
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June 13, 2008 11:12 PM EDT --
In the "Passive Resistance" articles , we learned how to recognize some of the passive voice's many disguises and how to deal with them. While the techniques varied, the result was always . . .
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June 22, 2008 08:58 PM EDT --
In my earlier post 22 Reasons Not To Trust Spell-Check , I gave you a test: Replace each (?) with the appropriate word from the following list.
I know (?) no way that Porsche could be (?). . . .
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June 23, 2008 04:54 PM EDT --
In the last post I offered you a challenge: to type the word 'til in MS Word . . . with a properly curving apostrophe. If you tried it, you probably typed 'til (note the mark is actually . . .
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July 06, 2008 10:40 PM EDT --
You're just writing along, trying to meet your deadline. You certainly don't mean to hurt anyone. But then, without even thinking about it, you've done it... you've dangled a participle. . . .
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July 29, 2008 10:04 AM EDT --
Here's a quick overview of the helpful articles on grammar and writing now available at The Grammar Weasel :
Dangling Participles (series of 2 articles)
Participial Phrases
Absolute . . .
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August 05, 2008 12:20 PM EDT --
The lowly period is the smallest of all punctuation marks. Easy to overlook Easy to accidentally double.. And those two goofs alone might cost me a publishing contract.
But it’s the period’s other . . .
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June 16, 2008 10:20 AM EDT --
Earlier I promised a long-awaited distinction between passive voice and passive writing —or more specifically, passive verbs . Passive voice describes a sentence in which the subject receives . . .
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June 16, 2008 11:23 AM EDT --
I ended my last post with a curious sentence:
But was and were , along with all the to-be verbs, are the source of many grammatical misunderstandings.
Or, simplified: . . .
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August 13, 2008 12:34 PM EDT --
In my last post , I remarked that we were going to look at the most common use of periods in fiction after terminating a sentence: ellipses.
First, a clarification. Ellipses is the plural of both . . .
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August 13, 2008 01:14 PM EDT --
Previous post: Total Ellipse
In typing ellipses, you might have noticed that three consecutive periods triggers an autocorrect feature in Word. It converts “period-period-period” into . . .
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June 13, 2008 11:06 PM EDT --
In Part I we learned that a sentence with a passive-voice verb takes the form:
A was/were B -ed
where A is a subject receiving action (rather than performing it) and B is . . .
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March 08, 2009 12:32 AM EST --
You’re anxiously awaiting the response to a manuscript you dutifully submitted for critique, competition, or publication. You’ve labored extensively on meticulously selecting the most incisively . . .
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March 12, 2009 04:10 PM EDT --
In the last post we examined how adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. And I asked if there were any one adverb capable of doing all three.
The answer was in my hint: there’s . . .
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