Tag: writing
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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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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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 19, 2008 02:07 PM EDT --
The Dialogue Bog
The dialogue bog is where many beginning fiction writers seem to get caught. It's a set of common dialogue problems that mark you as an amateur. They're easy mistakes . . .
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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 10, 2008 05:55 PM EDT --
It was a dark and stormy night.
Uh-oh, that doesn't bode well for this article. For over a century that sentence has gained a reputation as the worst possible opening for a work of fiction. Charles . . .
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June 17, 2008 09:25 AM EDT --
Hello, Tuesday WE Opt-in!
Here are some links to my most popular articles. Each has received more than 10 comments. Give them a look if you haven't already!
Florida 2000 vs. Florida 2008 . . .
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June 27, 2008 06:04 PM EDT --
The comma is probably the most commonly used punctuation mark in the English language. Or maybe it's second after the period; I'm not sure. But I think I can say with certainty that it's the . . .
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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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July 17, 2008 01:16 PM EDT --
Most beginning writers use far more words than necessary. It's probably because we all had some junior high English teacher who demanded x-hundred-word essays ("Shakespeare was a very, very, . . .
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