In the time of Charlemagne, some monk thought it would be a good idea to invent lower case letters. As a result, we no longer have to look at solid walls of capital letters when we read. Alas, we have had to wonder how and when to use capital letters ever since. Here are some basic capitalization rules.
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So you want to become an auto mechanic. You search the internet for inspiration from world-famous auto mechanics. Wait. There aren’t any world-famous auto mechanics. So many other things you might want to become are like that. If you want to learn, you actually have to take classes. You have to go out and meet people to get inspiration. But a writer? You realize, of course, that you became a writer in first grade. No one has any choice about that. Nonetheless, some people—maybe yourself included––grow up and aspire to become writers. That is, you want to put your words out where someone else will want to read them. Who better to consult than other writers? You can find all kinds of advice from world-famous writers. Or even writers you never heard of before. And I’ve compiled some for you.
Continue reading →Words ought to mean something. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get into the habit of writing common words and phrases that add no meaning. These filler words only inflate the word count and decrease readability scores. You may be familiar with Flesch-Kinkaid reading scores or the Gunning Fog Index. They examine the number of words in a sentence and the number of syllables in the words. Long sentences with long words are hard to read. Sometimes you need long sentences or long words to express your thoughts. But you don’t need filler words and phrases. Readers will probably not be consciously aware of filler words in writing. After all, they are so commonplace. So writers need to be aware of them as they proofread and edit what they’ve written. Recognize weak, unnecessary words. And delete them without mercy.
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Whenever writers try to get anything published, they encounter editors. By that time, they should have already been editing it themselves. Writers and editors have a complicated relationship. I’ll share some quotations in a bit. On the bright side, editors will catch that glaring error writers have missed in a dozen sessions of proofreading. That is, of course, in the case of writers who actually proofread before sending something off. I’m thinking of one particularly embarrassing error of fact I notice in print that I wish the editor had noticed earlier. But editors have also found spelling errors and instances where I apparently tried to rewrite a sentence and got distracted, never to notice again. English has weird spelling, but it also generally has one and only one correct spelling of a word. Punctuation, on the other hand, has various principles about which people disagree. Sometimes passionately. If a writer who hates a lot of commas works with an editor who loves to add commas, they might come to blows. Maybe literally.
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I have had fun over the years collecting mistakes with homonyms. That is, when people choose the wrong word when a pair of words sound similar. It can be even more fun when someone reaches for a cliché and butchers it. Welcome to the latest in my occasional series highlighting misused pears pairs of words. Gardeners use a hoe to break up soil, often to plant a row of some kind of vegetable. Anyone dealing with clay soil knows it can be backbreaking work. So a “tough row to hoe” means a difficult task. But hoeing the toughest row seems more reasonable than trying to hoe an entire road! Why not use heavy equipment instead? Yet so many people write “tough road to hoe.” Row and road aren’t strictly homonyms, but they sound enough alike to confuse the careless.
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