If you’ve been writing for a long time, you’re well read and/or well educated, and you happen to have a large vocabulary, it’s not uncommon to want to show it off. After all, long and complicated words that only a handful of people can understand make you sound smarter, right?
Naturally, the answer is no — in fact, using big words may even make you sound less intelligent.
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For this installment of our ‘vs.’ post, we thought principal and principle could use some clearing up. Many of you rarely have an opportunity to use either one in your writing, so mix-ups are a common occurrence.
Of course, ignorance is never an excuse for misusing your homonyms, so even though the mistakes may be completely innocuous, it’s time to learn the right way.
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In an earlier blog post, we briefly touched on the subject of active sentences and passive sentences. Usually called active voice and passive voice, this designation affects the meaning and effectiveness of almost any sentence.
Writers are constantly instructed to write in the active voice, but it’s not always easy to distinguish between the two. Here are some tips to help you along.
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Dashes are used in all types of writing for many different reasons. To the untrained eye (which is almost everyone, including lots of seasoned writers) these dashes are all the same. However, all dashes are not created equal and you may get dinged by an editor if you use the wrong one in the wrong situation.
Confused? I feel your pain. Dashes come in three different varieties. You have your hyphen, the em-dash and the en-dash. It’s challenging to write effectively and use immaculate grammar when you make mistakes that you didn’t even know were mistakes. Read on!
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If you’ve ever had to look through an article or other piece of writing that was presented in a large font, you may have missed some rather obvious errors. Whether the writing was your own or someone else’s, large type lends itself to grammatical and spelling errors being left on the page instead of corrected.
Despite the wording in the title of this post, the issue isn’t really with the size of the type, but with the person editing it.
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Whether you’re creating a monthly report, a term paper, a website or a short story, a writing outline is usually a good starting point. A proper outline helps you organize your thoughts and ideas and presents them in logical form.
This simplifies the writing process, because everything is laid out in front of you. In a way, you can “empty your mind” onto the screen or paper, and the likelihood of leaving out any pertinent information or plot twists is minimal.
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If you’re like a lot of writers, students, business people or others who use words to make a point or tell a story, you’ve been confused about metaphors and similes at one time or another. That’s not to say you haven’t used them successfully. All writers use them to help paint pictures in the readers’ minds, so the writing is richer and more complete.
These two literary tools are similar but different at the same time. Every simile is a metaphor, yet not every metaphor is a simile, but they are both used to make comparisons. Here are some basic definitions to help you out.
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For this month’s edition of our “vs.” post, the words “flare” and “flair” came to mind.
Flare and flair are a couple of homophones that differ in spelling and in meaning, yet figuring out which one to use in the proper situation is often more of a guess than anything else. Here is some information on the two words that should help point you in the right direction.
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For a productive writer in any genre, there is rarely time to get down about editorial corrections or criticism. Yes, it may sting sometimes and no writer enjoys seeing their work dissected and critiqued, but good writers find a way to come back stronger than ever.
It’s quite normal to take comments and remarks personally when we feel they are about us. We let it drain on our emotions and self-esteem, even if we aren’t completely sure we were the intended target.
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Here’s a classic grammar rule that we’ve all heard a time or two. In fact, if you went to any school from kindergarten through grade 8, you’ve probably heard it hundreds of times.
“I before E, except after C” was a great way to help with those tricky English spellings that had us scratching our heads every day. With the rule in place, we could write a paper or a story, then go back and fix any words where the rule applied.
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