Hearing the advice that “was” is passive voice never fails to set my eye twitching. “Was” (or “were”) by itself isn’t passive voice. Does it signal weak writing? Sure. An excessive use of “was” means your verb use lacks variety—and it’s often a sign of telling, not showing. When I reviewed six automatic editing tools for […]
Get your rules out of my style The only rule of style is consistency. If you want to use the Oxford comma, use it. If you hate the Oxford comma, don’t use it. Neither is wrong. Anyone who tells you otherwise is confusing style and rules. Rules and style are not the same. Rules involve […]
First comes writing, then comes editing, then comes the final draft and the publish button. After my roundup of writing articles, it seemed appropriate to compile a list of my favorite articles about editing too. Though you can read posts I have on editing, editing myths, and grammar, I want to feature informative posts from […]
How to use a semi-colon is a problem that baffles many people—whether they realize it or not. But no more. Let’s put an end to semi-colon confusion. Those poor, misunderstood semi-colons. And those poor, misunderstood editors who have to fix all fifty semi-colon mistakes in a single manuscript. Ahem. That may be an exaggeration. A […]
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Happiness for me is making grammar easy and accessible. I’ve already given you grammar tricks for its/it’s, whose/who’s, your/you’re, and I/me. Now I am BACK with a few more for you. This time we’re tackling let’s/lets, i.e./e.g., and amount/number. Are you ready? Here we go. Let’s or lets? Let’s is a contraction for “let us.” […]