Category: Writing Issues
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The Keys to Making a Good Summary
Several days ago, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made political history by speaking over 25 hours on the Senate floor, falling silent only briefly to take sips of water from a bottle. As a writer and former public speaking instructor, I considered a question that probably few others considered: How would you summarize his speech? Emily…
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Affect/Effect and Other Commonly Confused Word Pairs — Part III
It wouldn’t be too difficult to write a blog exclusively on the confusion that often arises over whether to use affect or effect in a sentence. But before taking on that challenge, let’s look at two other word pairs that are sometimes confused. Device and Devise Device is a noun that typically refers to a machine,…
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Commonly Confused Word Pairs: Part II
One of my December blog posts focused on three pairs of commonly confused words. There is almost no limit to such word pairs in the English language, but here are four more to consider. Envelop and Envelope Envelop is a verb that means “to completely enclose or surround someone or something,” as in “she enveloped the…
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Commonly Confused Word Pairs: Part I
English is a tricky language. There are a multitude of word pairs that are similar in spelling but don’t have quite the same meaning. There are also cases where two words are spelled differently, but one is often used when the other word is the one that conveys the appropriate meaning. We’ll look at three…
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More on Metaphors
Since writing my first blog on metaphors two weeks ago, I’ve learned a lot more about them. The English word “metaphor” comes from the Greek word μεταφο (metaphorá), meaning a transfer of ownership. That’s what a metaphor does. It transfers the characteristics of one word to another, so they both own the same meaning. There are actually…
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Metaphors: Helpful But Use with Caution
The popular musical The Fantasticks revolves around a boy meets girl-next- door romance that receives some subtle encouragement from the respective fathers. In one particular song, the boy, Matt, expresses his love for the girl Lucinda, in a series of vivid metaphors. Imagining himself on a desert, he describes her as “cool clear water” for…
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Is it Okay to Break the “Rules of Grammar”?
“Rules are meant to be broken.” The person who makes that statement usually intends to break some rules or has already done so. But rules, in whatever context they occur, were created for a purpose and breaking them will likely carry consequences that the rulebreaker may regret. The same holds true with the rules of…
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In Defense of Adverbs
When it comes to the “Parts of Speech” family, the adverb is the red-headed stepchild, the runt of the litter. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs,” declares no less a writer than Stephen King. “To put it another way,” King continues, adverbs “are like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it…
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Letting Acronyms and Abbreviations Work for You
A letter I sent to my friends Frank, a scuba diving instructor, and Terry, a radar engineer, came back to me because I didn’t have the right zip code. You may not know it, but the sentence above has three acronyms in it, specifically SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), RADAR (radio detection and ranging), and…
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Avoiding Excessive Repetition of Words
My dissertation, completed over 40 years ago, dealt with the antislavery movement in Ohio. Not surprisingly, various forms of the word “slavery” appeared frequently throughout my composition. Besides slaves themselves, there were slave laws, slave states, and slaveholders as well as debates on slavery, petitions on slavery, slavery supporters, and slavery opponents. Then, of course,…