Redundancy in a sentence is annoying, and it is also a nuisance. Conveying information in more than one way, or by repeating wording, is consciously or subconsciously distracting to the reader and contributes to compositional clutter. Note in the discussions and revisions following each example how...
Adjectives and Adverbs Guide
This post discusses two categories of parts and speech key to helping writers describe things and actions.AdjectivesAn adjective is a word or a combination of two or more words that modify or provide additional information about a noun. There are three general uses of adjectives: attributive, predicate,...
8 Great Writing Tips for Kids
Here are my best tips on how to keep growing and improving as a writer, however young you are:#1: Have a go at some writing exercises – you can find lots of these online, or you could have a go at them in workbooks or school books. Lots of adults find writing exercises helpful, too, so that they...
How to Create a Character Profile
Have you created character profiles for the main cast of your novel?While not all authors use character profiles, many find them a very handy tool for keeping track of their characters – and for developing and fleshing out those characters in the first place.Done well, a character profile can help you...
When to Use a Colon: Rules and Examples
The colon can be a tricky punctuation mark. You’ve probably grasped periods, question marks, exclamation points, and commas – but the rules surrounding colons may seem a bit trickier.There are two main ways to use colons:To introduce an item or a series of items.To replace a semi-colon between two independent...
Definitely use “the” or “a”
When to use the indefinite article a and when to use the definite article the depends mostly on how specific you want to be. During a wedding ceremony the groom would say, “Give me the ring! The wedding ring!” because he must have a particular ring, while a carpenter would say, ‘Hand me a nail” because...
How to Write a Book Outline: Fiction and Nonfiction
You learned how to write outlines in school, I suppose. You were probably required to do it a certain way:I. Roman numerals for the main pointsA. capital letters for the sub-points1. Regular Arabic numerals for the sub-sub-pointsa. lower-case letters for all the sub-points below thatWe could call it...
8 Great Essay Writing Tips for Students
Whether you enjoy writing or not, there’s probably a fair amount of it that you have to do as a student. I don’t think essays are anyone’s favourite thing to write (and I say that as a former English Literature student!) … but by honing your writing process, you can get them over and done...
When to Use a Comma: 10 Rules and Examples
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...
Understanding “Either … Or” and “Neither … Nor”
If you’re presenting two alternatives, you’ll often use an “either … or” or a “neither … nor” construction. Here’s how those work:You can choose either cereal or toast for your breakfast.My friend’s car is neither green nor brown.Either is used in the affirmative sense,...
5 Wordy Sentences Examples and Corrections
The careful writer always reviews their prose, and one of the qualities they aspire to demonstrate is conciseness, or brevity of expression. Revision of the following wordy sentences, accompanied by commentary about the revision, provides specific examples of the types of verbosities to eliminate.1....
Subject-Verb Agreement: Rules and Examples
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...
Oscar Nominations 2020: The Complete List
Todd Phillips’ “Joker,” a comic-book origin story about Batman’s biggest foe, scored a leading 11 Oscar nominations on Monday, including best picture, best director for Phillips and best actor for Joaquin Phoenix.Martin Scorsese’s mob epic “The Irishman,” Quentin Tarantino’s ode to Los Angeles “Once...
The 14 English Punctuation Marks With Examples
Do you know how to use punctuation marks correctly in English? While some might seem straightforward, you may come across punctuation marks that you’re unsure about … so this post is designed to serve as a handy reference. You’ll find “further reading” suggestions for each punctuation mark, if...
5 Problems with Parenthesis
Parenthesis is the strategy of setting a word, phrase, or clause off from a sentence to interject additional information into that statement. Despite the name, parenthesis can be accomplished with two commas or a pair of dashes as well as with a brace of parentheses. However, several problems can occur...
