Grammar
February 23, 2010
- Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Everyone knows the saying and knows it's called "Murphy's Law," but does anyone know how it came about? It started in aerospace engineering when using a human, specifically Murphy's unnamed assistant, in a crash test. What Edward Murphy actually said was that if there was a way for his assistant to make a mistake he would. In conversation later ...
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February 3, 2010
- Merriam-Webster says that the adverb form of "supposed" is indeed "supposedly," but the adverb form of "supposable" is "supposably."Webster's New World is a little vaguer, noting "supposably" only as a "related form" of "supposed." However, because WNW has a separate listing for "supposedly" and none for ...
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January 9, 2010
- New Reference Books 2010Booklist:General:Life: Selected Quotations by Paulo CoelhoConcise Oxford English Dictionary: Luxury Edition, 11th edition, revised 2009 by Oxford DictionariesOxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject (Oxford Paperback Reference) by Susan RatcliffeThe Cultural Theorist's Book of Quotations by Arthur Asa BergerOxford Paperback Dictionary & Thesaurus ...
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December 31, 2009
- Reuters today reported on some overused and icky terms that are now "banned."Think "sexting," "unfriended," and any compound including the word "czar."The Reuters piece is extremely informative -- not for what it says but for how it says it. You see, the headline tells us that several words are "in U.S. banned words list." Then the first paragraph ...
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December 24, 2009
- I have a blog on my website on Writing Tips for Writers. This weeks tip is about How Important are the Basic Rules of Grammar. I spent the night with Steven King (not literally) reading his book On Writing. Great book by the way, and it made me think. Stop by and read my entry and feel free to comment.www.kellyabellbooks.comHappy Holidays to All!
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November 12, 2009
- Has anyone, in the course of their manuscript, made a concerted effort to reduce the use of the word "and" by a half (or more). To do so is stating to look better to me.
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November 6, 2009
- I posted this some time ago. Today, I received an email of thanks because it helped someone. I thought it might be worth setting out again for any writer who might be spelling impaired or grammatically challenged. Plus, for dyslexic writers of all ages there is hope. You can improve your writing skills. Here are some of my tried and true writing tricks for challenged writers. - Start A List - ...
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November 5, 2009
- Please, I’m not perfect. I don’t claim to be a fiction editor. I have worked editing nonfiction, but NF is a completely different animal. I have a scientist’s eye. I zoom in on patterns, and look for things falling outside the norm. I created this list because these are issues I address everyday in comment boxes on writing websites. I hope it helps. The examples are pulled from my ...
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October 19, 2009
September 18, 2009
- Since when has it become commonplace to combine a conversation into one paragraph? That two (or more) people speaking are not identified by individual paragraphs for their words? Have grammar rules changed, and I missed it?The book I am reading right now has whole conversations going on separated by quotation marks to delineate the individual speakers...not different paragraphs, but just one ...
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