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...

Balancing Your Sentences Grammar can sometimes be a balancing act. This is especially true when trying to express two or more ideas in the one sentence. Balancing your sentence structure will improve your writing style and improve the clarity of the sentence. Writing a well balanced sentence is often referred to as parallelism or parallel construction. Essentially you are trying to make each par...

Writing Numbers How do you write numbers? This is a common question asked by many writers. The answer depends on what field you’re working in or what style guide you need to follow. Arabic numerals are generally used in commercial, mathematics, statistics, science, or technical fields. Other works like literary or humanistic mostly use numbers written out in words. Some types of numbers are alwa...

Affect or Effect? These two words can confuse the best of writers. They look almost the same but they have different meanings. So what’s the difference between the two? Affect is mostly used as a verb; it is used to show how something is being influenced. Example: Drinking alcohol affects my asthma. (My asthma is being influenced by the alcohol.) How to remember: the a in affect could stand f...