I wrote about MasterClass a couple of months ago in my review of James Patterson’s course on Writing – and this month, I’ve been enjoying Margaret Atwood’s course on Creative Writing. In case you don’t want to head back to that post, I’ll quickly recap the basics of MasterClass itself here: What’s MasterClass? MasterClass is … Read more
What’s your favorite word of compliment or admiration? How do you express approval? These are important questions for each generation of young people, who want their vocabulary to distinguish them from previous generations. It’s not fool-proof: a slang expression of approval is often fashionable in one place or time but not another, and may even … Read more
Samm [sic] asks “What does [sic] mean?” Sic in square brackets is an editing term used with quotations or excerpts. It means “that’s really how it appears in the original.” It is used to point out a grammatical error, misspelling, misstatement of fact, or, as above, the unconventional spelling of a name. For example, you … Read more
Commas can be a particularly tricky punctuation mark. There are some cases where you know you should use a comma – such as when separating items in a list – but there are other times when you might be unsure whether or not a comma is needed. While there’s some degree of flexibility in how … Read more
Whatever you write: blog posts, short stories, client pieces – I suspect that, at some point, you’ve at least considered writing a novel. Maybe it’s something you contemplate every November, when NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) rolls around. Or maybe you’ve had an idea bubbling away for years now, but you’ve been waiting until you … Read more
The terms metaphor and simile are slung around as if they meant exactly the same thing. A simile is a metaphor, but not all metaphors are similes. Metaphor is the broader term. In a literary sense metaphor is a rhetorical device that transfers the sense or aspects of one word to another. For example: The … Read more
This article contains every common preposition in the English language. Isn’t it nice to know that you can learn them all? A list of every common verb or every common noun would be very long… Prepositional phrases usually begin with a preposition and end with an object. For example, in the prepositional phrase under the … Read more