by Pat Iyer | Jul 10, 2019 | Blog, Editing, Video, Writing Skills
Talk about concise writing – it does not get any briefer. Today I saw an ad that popped up to the right of a YouTube video I was watching. It caught my eye because it was so concise. It read: New Need Now And the name of the product. In the world of writing,...
by Pat Iyer | Jun 12, 2019 | Blog, Writing Skills
Is a cow an “it”? What is the correct use of that? In order to answer these questions, I need to address a related grammatical question about the use of that. Is a Human a “That”? In the course of editing manuscripts, I began to notice that people seemed to be...
by Pat Iyer | May 15, 2019 | Blog, Writing Skills
A homophone is a word that sounds the same as another word but has a different meaning. Note that some of the word pairs aren’t pure homophones, such as lose and loose. I include them because they’re close enough to get easily confused. Lose/loose “Lose” is a verb...
by Pat Iyer | May 1, 2019 | Blog, Grammar, Writing Skills
A comma may be a little squiggle, but it does a lot for your writing. It adds meaning, clarity, elegance, and, in some cases, beauty to your writing. Its absence can bore or confuse the reader. Comma usage is loaded with rules, and it’s a good idea to study them....
by Pat Iyer | Apr 24, 2019 | Blog, Writing Skills
Maybe. Are you confusing singular and plural forms in the same sentence? And is this really wrong? Grammar rarely enters the world of culture and politics. Pronouns are a notable exception to this generality. Prior to the 1970s, the default pronoun was “he.” “If a...
by Pat Iyer | Apr 5, 2019 | Blog, Writing Skills
Also known as incomplete sentences, fragments are generally frowned on in the English language. Exceptions exist, and I’ll get to them later. Defining sentence fragments First, let’s define a sentence fragment. It’s a sentence...
