Search results for “LEC”

Part One of our current discussion on dialogue concerned format, punctuation, and attribution in written conversations. Part Two will center on internal dialogue that conveys what characters are thinking as opposed to speaking. An earlier article on the subject pointed out that direct internal dialogue is expressed in the first person (I, we) and written …

Many of us have been there before: We're writing or speaking with confidence in our content. For a secret second, we might even feel, well, educated. Then, unbeknownst to us, improper pronouns leak in and sabotage the impression we were making. Worse yet, we may not know how or why our eloquence tripped. Using the …

Thank you to the many readers who commented thoughtfully on both How Did They Get in Here? (July 3, 2019) and How Can They Be Singular? (July 31, 2019). Today we'll wind up our discussion of the singular they, including modern arguments for its use. When we ran this series in 2015, we received little …

We as writers have probably all been stuck at some point: What do we say, and how do we say it? We do our best to form the thought or idea into words, but it seems like someone else can simply write it better. The temptation then starts to surface. No one will know if …

We typically know what a sentence subject is and where to find it: Mary baked the cake. The train left on time. Baseball games are long. Those with a keen eye—as well as those who have read our rules on subject-verb agreement—will also spot the subjects in the following sentences (and understand why the verbs …

Writers today have problems keeping their sentences internally consistent. This is especially true of print journalists. Because of staff cutbacks at financially challenged newspapers, many articles are proofread hastily, if at all. Combine that with the shocking decline in Americans’ English language skills over the last fifty years or so and you get sentences unworthy …

We thought we would lighten things up a bit this week. We hope you enjoy it. There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is up. It's easy to understand up, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, …

Understanding sentence structures helps us shape the art of good writing. In Part One of our discussion, we identified the four foundational sentence constructions and reviewed the first two, simple and compound sentences. We'll next look at complex and compound-complex sentences. Complex Sentence A complex sentence has one independent main clause and at least one dependent clause, …

GONE MISSING Several readers responded to our recent article The Media Made Me Do It, which asked for alternatives to gone missing. Interestingly, the overwhelming choice was to simply replace the phrase with is missing or has been missing. This is fine in many, perhaps most, cases, e.g., The man was missing instead of The man went missing. But it’s no help at all …

"Nature abhors a vacuum," Aristotle once said, and the same holds true for language. If we detect an empty lexical space because we feel existing words no longer occupy it well, we will look to fill it, often with something that seems or sounds fresh within our current culture and era. For a time, we …