Grammar Did Not Give Birth to Your Mother POP QUIZ Grammar Question 1 – Grammar is: A) the nice lady your mother calls Mum, who bakes tasty chocolate chip cookies; B) your mother singing a telegram; or C) the branch of linguistics that deals with syntax and morphology. Ignore that your mouth is probably watering for a chocolate chip cookie or that you are having visions of your mother danci...

The Character Next Door So you finally have the time to finish that story. Your outline touches on every aspect of the plot. You’ve made it the best that it can be. You’re sure your efforts have the right mix of suspense, humor, clarity and originality. All of that is necessary, but what about connecting with your readers? Fiction writing isn’t the same as weaving fairy tales or campfire stories...

Reposition Your Preposition Never end a sentence with a preposition! This is one of the first rules of writing you may have learnt in high school English. It is the one grammar rule that was always enforced, especially when writing essays. It is also one of the easiest rules to break, because sometimes a sentence just doesn’t sound right any other way. So the question at hand is whether or not th...

Placing Your Apostrophe Many writers get their apostrophe placement incorrect, or simply confuse some words with others. In an effort to ensure their writing is acceptable, writers have a tendency to either overuse or under use the apostrophe. The most common area of writing where this occurs is with possession. A noun and a pronoun are two different things, and are treated as such when changing...

Words Writers Misspell Contrary to popular belief, not all writers are good spellers. In fact, and unfortunately, many writers—particularly writing “newbies”—are not. Even self-professed “grammar queens” and “grammar nazis” are guilty of making regular spelling mistakes. No, spelling mistakes are not reserved for children and those who failed high-school English class. We simply cannot assume tha...

Single Or Double Quotation Marks? Many people get mixed up when it comes to using single and double quotation marks. This is not surprising when you consider that different countries have different preferences. And to add more confusion, quotation marks are also known by other names, such as inverted commas and occasionally aerial commas. In fact, an epidemic of “quotation mark abuse” in everyda...

Confused By Some Words? How many times have you typed a word only to find that it wasn’t quite the one you thought it was? This happens all the time as we bash out our words on the keyboard, unaware that we should have used the ‘other’ version of a particular word in its place. Here is a short list of some ‘confusing’ words and their actually meanings (you should be able to find many more by sea...

The Disappearing Comma When is a comma not a comma? When it’s missing! The most important job for a comma is to prevent confusion for the reader. If a comma isn’t there, the reader may become lost. With faster technologies comes faster communication, which in turn leads to less punctuation as we pound our fingers across the keyboard at an ever increasing speed. And as a result, many pieces of wr...

The Editor’s Which Hunt When trying to decide whether to use that or which, many writers opt for which. Why? Probably because it feels safer for them when they’re not sure which word to use. Luckily for the writer it’s the editor’s job to hunt down all of the whiches and check to see if they should be replaced with that. But how does the writer, and the editor for that matter, work out which wo...