When I was a novice writer, I chafed at the idea of using an outline. I was certain organizing my thoughts in advance would stifle my creativity and make my writing stiff and uninspired. After all, how can serendipity happen if you’ve got everything planned?
But then I started creating content for a living, and I needed to turn out several polished articles every week. I write at least 240,000 words per year to earn my keep.
Without conjunctions, you’d be forced to express every complex idea in a series of short, simplistic sentences: I like cooking. I like eating. I don’t like washing dishes afterward.
Conjunctions are words that link other words, phrases, or clauses together.
Hyperbole (hi-PER-buh-lee) is language that is obviously exaggerated and not meant to be taken literally. Writers often use hyperbole for emphasis or to be funny.
You can find hyperbole in plenty of English idioms: She’s asked a million questions. You could have knocked me over with a feather. He’s as quiet as a mouse. Now I’ve seen everything.
Hyperbole, like metaphors and similes, is a type of figurative language.
Imagine you need to write down a phone number, but you don’t have any paper handy. What would you use? Some scribble on a receipt, a napkin, or even their hands. Others repeat the number mentally until they locate a sheet of paper. It’s true; necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, people often generate creative solutions if they need something not readily available.
Recently Grammarly asked its social media communities which writing mistakes were the worst kinds of errors. Our fans tend to find substantive grammatical trip-ups, like verb errors, far more frustrating than typographical errors and “stylistic” errors, such as homophone misspelling and preposition placement.
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Grammar snobs love to tell anyone who will listen: You should NEVER end a sentence with a preposition! Luckily for those poor, persecuted prepositions, that just isn’t true. Here are a few preposition guidelines:
A colon introduces an element or series of elements that illustrates or amplifies the information that preceded the colon. While a semicolon normally joins two independent clauses to signal a close connection between them, a colon does the job of directing you to the information following it.
Many people are confused about using colons, but their function is actually quite straightforward.
