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People who write for a living, such as writers and journalists, have usually had more than a few years of training by the time they become professionals. With that in mind, you’d think they would find it easy to determine whether a word should be capitalized or left lowercased. But capitalization rules don’t tell you […]
DOUBLE NEGATIVES Children learn this so-called double-negatives rule right after their “ABCs” or it seems that way. When I was a kid, if a teacher heard you say “I don’t got no . . .” or anything resembling that phrase, you were bent over the desk and rewarded with a beating (usually with a fiberglass yardstick). I realize teachers […]
Lie, Lay, Laid, and Lain Every day I see many instances of poor grammar, words being misused, punctuation used improperly, and more. Does it bother me? Not really. But the problem is there’s no need for it. Unless you’re in a profession where grammar is important, people soon forget the grammatical explanations they learned when […]
Hyphens and How to Use Them When it comes to hyphenation, prose often suffers from the Goldilocks effect: either too much or too little, but seldom just right. Here are some erroneously constructed elements along with repaired revisions that let them eat, sit, or sleep with contentment. With no more delay, we’ll start. If we […]
When to Refer to Animals by Gender I’m writing this post in response to an email question I received regarding how to refer to animals when writing. Should I refer to the dog as it or he? They asked. The answer to when to refer to animals by gender is both simple and not so […]
The Truth About Redundancies People don’t seem to care much about redundancies, but that might be because they don’t know the truth about redundancies. What truth? The fact that while you may not care about them, the people who do are silently snickering every time you use one. And while they may not say anything […]
7 Common Grammar Mistakes And How to Correct Them The how-to-correct-them-part is easy. Practice using them right. Make a habit out of it. Don’t simply read this article, and then forget it. Read the article, and then select one of the grammar rules and practe using it properly for several weeks. After that, your list […]
Printers for Self-publishing The publishing world has experienced an explosion of new books, many of them from indie authors. According to Bowker more than 725,000 self-published works were registered in 2015. That should give you an idea of the number of books being published by indies. Most of those people will need printers for self-publishing […]
Compound Word List Compound words stymie people all the time. And I don’t mean just regular people whose profession is not writing. I know of many writers who struggle with when to use one word and when to use two, or when to hyphenate. This list of compound words should help. This is not a […]
Capitalizing Dialogue You’ve already learned about dialogue tags—I hope. Now learn how capitalizing dialogue is easy. Read on to find out how to capitalize dialogue—when to do it and when not to. Capitalizing Dialogue Capitalizing dialogue is one of the areas that makes authors stumble, especially new authors. Don’t let it. It’s not that difficult. […]
Mike Landis
Giacomo Giammatteo
Mona Curington
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