Good Advice About Bad Writing

How does one avoid being a bad writer? Presumably, most people visiting or subscribing to this site needn’t concern themselves with being accused of high crimes against the English language, but allow me to make a distinction between poor writing and bad writing.

Book Review: “Sin and Syntax”

In 1999, writer and editor Constance Hale, perhaps inspired by Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s whimsically worded and illustrated grammar and punctuation guides, wrote Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose. Hale’s book, like Gordon’s works, remains superb proof that reading handbooks about writing can be an experience both nutritious and tasty.

Are Names of Sports Teams and Bands Singular, or Plural?

When referring to athletic teams or similar groups, what form of verb or pronoun applies? The recent victory of the Miami Heat over the Oklahoma City Thunder in the National Basketball Association championships indirectly put this issue in the headlines.

Every Company Is a Publishing Company

A recent Wall Street Journal article that beamed a spotlight on sophomoric speaking and grammar gaffes in the workplace covered the issue fairly thoroughly but left unsaid some pertinent points.

How Should You Refer to a Cultural Era?

The quote “If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there,” variously attributed (sometimes with slight differences in wording) to various iconic figures of a distinct cultural era, can appear at least seven ways based just on the treatment of the number. Which version is correct?

The Anglo-Saxon Angle

Are you an Anglist, or an anti-Anglist, or are you neutral in the debate about whether to favor words of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic origin over Latinate language?

What’s Missing from Your Editorial Process?

No one standard specific routine exists for optimizing the quality of written material, but various models have some procedures in common that are, with adjustments, appropriate to any context and any type of content.

5 Adjective Stacks, and How to Level Them

When a noun stack — a precarious pileup of nouns — is itself used to modify yet another noun, it is transformed into an adjective stack, which is just as hostile to clarity. The keyword in this case is relax: Shift the anchoring noun to precede the stack, and introduce prepositions as needed. (And insert hyphens to link words in phrasal adjectives).

3 Parenthetical Punctuation Puzzles

This sentence’s punctuation — a series of three commas — implies a flat progression of ideas without modulation. But the writer, after the fact, modifies the absolute word independence with the qualifying term relative, and should signal this slight case of backpedaling by marking the phrase “relative independence” as an interjection.

Forgo vs. Forego

What’s the difference between forgo and forego? It’s a foregone conclusion that there’ll be some confusion, but I’ll forgo further digression to get to the discussion.

Intrusive vs. Obtrusive

What is the difference between intrusive and obtrusive? The distinction between these words, and those between each of them and their synonyms, are subtle but useful.

Epithets Add Character

Have you thought about the impact of using epithets in your writing? An epithet (from the Greek word epithetos, meaning “added”) is a word or phrase used in place of or in addition to a name to characterize the person, place, or thing. In fiction or nonfiction, it’s an effective device for evoking the subject’s qualities and for elegant variation.

Next Page »

Categories

• Book Reviews
• Business Writing
• Competitions
• Expressions
• Fiction Writing
• Freelance Writing
• General
• Grammar
• Grammar 101
• Misused Words
• Punctuation
• Spelling
• Style
• Vocabulary
• Word of the Day
• Writing Basics