Tag: grammar
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The Red Pen: a Dash of Dashes
Dashes are sexy. Okay, maybe not sexy like Chris Hemsworth or a new pair of heels. But among punctuation marks, it’s the only one that leaves me a little breathless. Exclamation points are so obvious, semi-colons are pretentious, question marks too coy—oh, but the possibilities conveyed in that hot little horizontal pause! It’s enough to…
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The Red Pen: Comma Chameleon
Perhaps no single keystroke has incited such violence of emotion as the Oxford comma. Also called the serial comma, it’s more or less grammatically optional in America—but don’t let our noncommittal adoption of the mark fool you. The Oxford comma has become something of a pop culture icon. It appears on t-shirts, drinking glasses, infant…
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The Red Pen: December is for editing.
Ready, set . . . edit. It’s December, and NaNoWriMo 2018 is history. Forgoing Netflix binges and holiday preparations alike, your retinas are seared by long nights of blinking cursors and you have emerged triumphant (if exhausted) 50,000 words later. A newbie novelist might be ready to slap a cover on that mess and CreateSpace…
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The Red Pen: Sentences…the long and the short of it
I sentence you to better control of your syntax. Perhaps you’ve seen this brilliant syntax exercise before from Gary Provost, sometimes called the “writer’s writer”: This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring.…
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The Red Pen: Dangling Modifiers
Dangling: good for trained soldiers in rescue missions, bad for modifiers. Pardon me, but your modifier appears to be dangling…. Dangling or misplaced modifiers are feats of grammatical ambiguity that can create awkwardness for writers. A modifier is a phrase, clause or word that provides description in a sentence. Dangling or misplaced modifiers occur when…
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The Red Pen: A Two-Step in Dialogue Tags
“How are you?” she breathed. “I think you know,” he thundered. “Really?” she drawled. “Really,” he growled. Feel like you need a cold shower after reading this (unintentionally) hot and melodramatic scene? That’s because of the poorly-used dialogue tags. Realistic dialogue is hard enough to write without having to worry about…
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The Red Pen: Sentence Solutions
The ability to craft beautiful sentences is a rare gift. The ability to wreak grammatical havoc on all things syntactic is, alas, far more common. Here are three common mishaps and a pocketful of solutions to your most common syntax sins. Offender #1: The Run-On When you connect independent clauses without punctuation or conjunctions, you’ve…
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