Here are ten areas to be sure to attend to if you wish to be taken seriously as a professional writer. Formatting 1. Do not enter two letter spaces between sentences. Use of two spaces is an obsolete convention based on typewriter technology and will mark you as out of touch. If editors or other … Read more
In a post published recently, I discussed simple problems of parallelism in sentence construction. Here are three examples of more complex errors involving corresponding sentence elements. 1. “Low-interest rates have been one of the primary, if not the primary factor in extending the real estate boom in the United States.” The corresponding phrases in this … Read more
Words are sometimes randomly reincarnated to serve new purposes, and usually, the new usage is anything but offensive, and its connection may even be obscure: Does anyone object to the use of the word plane (meaning, basically, “surface”) to describe aircraft? Often, however, the extension of a term to a new connotation invites contempt. Here’s … Read more