What’s your favorite word of compliment or admiration? How do you express approval? These are important questions for each generation of young people, who want their vocabulary to distinguish them from previous generations. It’s not fool-proof: a slang expression of approval is often fashionable in one place or time but not another, and may even coming back into fashion later. A word that is fashionable in one school might be considered outdated in another. Perhaps the longest reigning compliment is…

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Samm [sic] asks “What does [sic] mean?” Sic in square brackets is an editing term used with quotations or excerpts. It means “that’s really how it appears in the original.” It is used to point out a grammatical error, misspelling, misstatement of fact, or, as above, the unconventional spelling of a name. For example, you might want to quote the printed introduction to a college catalog: Maple Leaf College is well-known for it’s [sic] high academic standards. Sic is the…

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Commas can be a particularly tricky punctuation mark. There are some cases where you know you should use a comma – such as when separating items in a list – but there are other times when you might be unsure whether or not a comma is needed. While there’s some degree of flexibility in how commas are used, it’s important to have a clear grasp of the rules. Seven Places Where You SHOULD Use Commas Rule #1: Use Commas to…

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Whatever you write: blog posts, short stories, client pieces – I suspect that, at some point, you’ve at least considered writing a novel. Maybe it’s something you contemplate every November, when NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) rolls around. Or maybe you’ve had an idea bubbling away for years now, but you’ve been waiting until you have more time to write. His response Writing a whole novel might feel rather daunting, especially if you’ve only ever written shorter pieces before. You…

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The terms metaphor and simile are slung around as if they meant exactly the same thing. A simile is a metaphor, but not all metaphors are similes. Metaphor is the broader term. In a literary sense metaphor is a rhetorical device that transfers the sense or aspects of one word to another. For example: The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. — “The Highwayman,” Alfred Noyes Here the moon is being compared to a sailing ship. The…

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This article contains every common preposition in the English language. Isn’t it nice to know that you can learn them all? A list of every common verb or every common noun would be very long… Prepositional phrases usually begin with a preposition and end with an object. For example, in the prepositional phrase under the hill, under is the preposition and the hill is the object. A prepositional phrase serves as an adjective or adverb; that is, it modifies a…

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Let’s say you’re writing a story that involves a character who’s smart, funny, gorgeous, and beloved by almost everyone. They sound great, right? Well, they might be. Or you might be inadvertently creating a “Mary Sue”. So what’s a Mary Sue … and why should you avoid using one in your story? Mary Sue Defined A Mary Sue is a character who is way too good to be true. She’s often exceptionally talented for her age; love interests throw themselves…

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This post outlines seven general areas of grammar and syntax that writers must be familiar with to enable them to write effectively. 1. Subject-Verb Agreement Use singular verbs for singular subjects and plural verbs with plural subjects. A verb should agree with its subject, not with an intervening modifying phrase or clause: “The box of cards is on the shelf.” Singular verbs are appropriate with the following parts of speech: • indefinite pronouns: “Everyone is here” • uncountable nouns: “The…

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One of the rules of language that you almost certainly know, even if you’ve never thought about it consciously, is that subjects and verbs must agree with each other in number. If that sounds a bit complicated or mathematical, here are a couple of very simple examples to show this in action: The child plays at the park. (Singular) The children play at the park. (Plural) A singular noun needs a singular verb; a plural noun needs a plural verb….

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If critics tell you that your stories have too much dialogue, maybe you should consider writing scripts. It’s different from writing ordinary prose. For one thing, a script is not the finished work of art. It’s the blueprint that the director and actors use to create the work of art. The good news about that: your words don’t have to carry all the weight. As a playwright, I like the way a stronger actor can make up for my weaker…

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