grammar
Dialogue Tags What Are Dialogue Tags and When Is It Best to Use Them? People, meaning writers, seem to mess up dialogue tags a whole lot. In an attempt to sound “writerly” or make it appear as if they are experience authors, they use ridiculous dialogue tags when they shouldn’t. What do I mean? The […]
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. […]
Are Pre Words Redundant? Pre is a prefix that means before. It’s fairly easy to understand and everyone I know of uses pre in one way or another. But are pre words redundant? preorder preboard preview prerecord pre-announce pre-arrange These are but a few of the pre words. There are many more. The problem I have with […]
Absolutely Is Absolutely Wrong It’s a well-known fact that absolutely is absolutely wrong. Well, for some people it is. And what makes it worse, is that people often use it as an intensifier for another absolute. I wrote about absolutes before. You can read about them here. Even the dictionaries have succumbed to popular and […]
Am I Grateful or Thankful I’ve had several people write to me about whether to use grateful or thankful, wondering when to use each word. My typical response of verifying my thoughts with a good dictionary and then presenting those people with answers didn’t work, mostly because the dictionaries seemed as confused as those people […]
Compare to and Compare With Some authors claim that compare to versus compare with is a useless argument–that they mean essentially the same thing, but this is not supported by actual data. The verb compare has several different meanings, some of which take the preposition “to”, while the others take “with”: Compare A to B […]
Wordiness Communication is so important in today’s world, that I’m always puzzled by the terrible misuse of the language. Many people seem to go out of their way to make things sound complicated; in fact, the legal and insurance businesses do it on purpose, I’m sure. They fill their documents and contracts with wordiness so […]
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