Tag: syntax
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The Red Pen: To pass, or not to pass…on passive voice
Passive (aggressive) voice might be appropriate for those mildly shade-throwing work emails that get CC’d to your boss, but should you nix it in your writing? What is passive voice? When we’re talking about voice in grammar, we’re talking about what part of a clause is on the receiving end of the action—the subject, or…
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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: 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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