Grammar

Writing Tips: How to use quotation marks

Few punctuation marks seem as misunderstood as quotation marks. Few punctuation marks seem as misunderstood as quotation marks. I see so many misuses of quotation marks in fiction and non-fiction, technical reports, brochures, advertising and just about everywhere else. The rules for quotation marks are fairly simple. Perhaps schools are not teaching how to use […]

Author, ACTIVATE!

Eliminate those awful passive sentences! I’ve been finding more passive sentences in my reading lately. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, scholarly articles or marketing bumph, this is an easy problem to fix. And it is a problem. Passive sentences are longer and less interesting than active sentences. Let’s take a first-grade example: Passive: The […]

My favourite proofreading tips

Don’t you just hate it when you see a typo in work you’ve just published, posted on a website or sent to a client? Every writer needs to learn how to proofread. As a professional editor for over 30 years, I have a few favourite techniques for effective proofreading. Here are some, plus a few […]

Writing tip: Break complex ideas into manageable chunks

Photo: Building Blocks by Myfear on Flickr. Creative Commons licence. Periodically, my university student sons ask for writing advice for their assignments. Most recently, the elder asked for another word for “prelude” or “precursor.” What the Blond Raven wanted to do was describe how Algeria’s experience in the 1990s, when a number of religious groups […]

Comma butterfly image © Copyright Peter Trimming;licensed for reuse under Creative Commons. Commas are probably the most abused punctuation mark in English today, and probably the most overused, too. Here are a few tips to make them easier to use correctly. Commas separate parts of a sentence: items in a list  phrases clauses. Don’t leave […]

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of work that shows severe problems with sentence structure. Whether in fiction or non-fiction, it’s almost as if the writers do not understand what a sentence is. For example: An analysis of survey results conducted by GHI concluded that different groups of consumers face different kinds of challenges, this […]