Get out the pruning shears: a big part of good writing is good editing. And a surefire way to give your writing a confidence boost is to eliminate words that weigh down your writing and make you sound uncertain.
We call these weasel words. Like weasels, they’re not necessarily bad on their own. In fact, they’re kind of cute. But weasels are known for escaping situations (ever heard of someone “weaseling out” of something?).
Besides being cool, dinosaurs are funny. Chuckling about these amusing extinct animals will help you cope with life. Check out these roaring dinosaur puns!
Answer: A thesaurus.
No list of dinosaur puns would be complete without this one. It is one of the oldest jokes in the book!
A few years ago, author Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, became a New York Times Bestseller. Kondo, a Japanese consultant who helps people get organized, detailed her KonMari method of decluttering in her book. We wondered if her principles could be applied to writing and found that they work just as well for creating clean copy as they do for creating a clean habitat.
Henry James once wrote.Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language,
With the start of spring and the promise of summer, now is a good time to think about seasonal words. Writers, by nature, are collectors of words and catchy turns of phrase, but are there some that should be retired when they fall out of season?
Guest post from Emily Green
Well, it took a decade, but it’s finally happened. People text so much that they’ve forgotten how to use proper grammar. What’s worse, it seems like the general population is accommodating them. This needs to stop. Let’s look at why text messaging is butchering grammar and what we can do to stop it.
Typing Shorthand is the Popular Style
You may not know what shorthand is by its name, but you’ve definitely seen it.
Everytime should be written as two separate words: every time. While some compound words like everywhere, everyday, and everyone have become commonplace in the English language, everytime is not considered an acceptable compound word. Consider the examples below:
Odds are good that the words “subjective and objective cases” mean nothing to you. “Case” is grammarian and linguistic jargon for categories of nouns based on the function of the noun in relation to the verbs and prepositions in a sentence.
It is even more confusing in English language because many cases have disappeared. Modern Ukrainian language has seven cases. Finnish has fifteen cases.
This one’s pretty easy: pouring something over a book would mean spilling something on it. Poring over a book means reading it with great attention. “Pour” and “pore” are never interchangeable; they are two completely different words.
There’s a well of spelling mistakes in the English language that never seems to dry up. A bump on the road that keeps tripping people and never seems to be fixed.
It’s always adorable when children attempt to write letters or caption illustrations, but can’t quite get the wording right. What’s even more adorable is when children write something they didn’t intend to write at all. Whether the culprit is bad handwriting or simply not sounding out a word correctly, ensure that you are encouraging your child to write by being supportive of all attempts.
