Tag Archive for: writing

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10 Words you need to stop misspelling

[Via Huffington Post]

Spelling pet peeves--everyone has got them. Here are 10 that drive people nuts. Which bug you the most? Any not on this list? => http://bit.ly/7u6X2E

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The elements of clunk

a whole new strain of bad writing has come to the fore, not only in student work but also on the Internet, that unparalleled source for assessing the state of the language.

=> http://bit.ly/gGJmWL

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First Books and Early Language Development

Jo Burnell (in KBR) treats us to this amazing post on the correlation between early language development and choosing first books for your child. Jo is an experienced paediatric speech pathologist with a passion for books.

‘What’s the point of all this alliteration business, anyway, and why do we bother to make things rhyme?’

This comment by a fellow writer took me by surprise. I had no idea that the links between normal language development and our writing techniques were not common knowledge.

Matching your writing techniques to the developmental skills of your target age group is a key to winning children over. It’s what makes children’s eyes widen with delight and lures them back for more. When a toddler is working hard at combining two words, their favourite books inevitably model how this is done.

As a speech pathologist who has helped children with communication difficulties for more than twenty-five years, it’s hard to know where to begin. Instead of presenting a mini-thesis, I’ll try to summarise some key points about normal patterns of language development and link these landmarks to how we write for children.

more => http://bit.ly/e11I4e

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The learning (b)log

Learning logs were a core part of my classroom practice, having seen the effects they have on improving student performance in the bilingual schools of New Brunswick in my first year of teaching. A student there would write down what they had learnt and what they felt they'd have to learn tomorrow in order to achieve the goals of the project they had set out on. In paper format they were quite tricky to manage, and as students peer-assessed there would be paper flying all over the place.

more => http://bit.ly/cqwo6r

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Ten Misheard Expressions To Avoid In Your Writing

Anyone can make a typo or a spelling mistake, and fixing those is pretty easy in the spellcheck era. If you want your writing totally error-free, you also need to avoid using expressions which you think you’re using correctly but which you’ve actually misheard. Here are ten examples to watch out for.

Having studied linguistics as my main subject at university many years ago, I do recognise that language usage changes over time, and that time period can be quite short. Prescriptive rules eventually give way if the majority of speakers of a language adopt a different approach (the switch from using “he” to “they” to refer to an unspecified individual is one obvious recent example).

However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t rules that continue to apply in particular contexts, or expressions that are, for all standard purposes, flat-out incorrect. For some reason there are few things that irk me more than writers using a phrase such as “different tact” and being blissfully unaware that they’ve got it quite wrong.

This is a list of some of the most common errors in that field. They’re mistakes which you won’t necessarily notice during conversations, but which should stick out like a sore thumb (not a saw thumb) in written work. Many spell-checking systems won’t pick these errors up, though Word did flag about half of them while I was writing this piece. (Confession: I’ve gathered quite a few of these examples from my Lifehacker US colleagues.)

Some of these mistakes attract their own false etymologies. People construct a pseudo-logical explanation for the version they’re using, and over time these can become quite widely believed. Leaving aside the fact that language is not always based in obvious logic anyway (see “beyond the pale” below), the existence of an apparently plausible explanation doesn’t make those expressions correct. It just makes it a little less likely that you’ll realise you’re wrong.

Read on => http://bit.ly/a5sqSL

Four Good Writing Resources to Keep on Hand

 

If you are engaging in a writing career, whether full or part time, you can't do without the basic tools of the trade. Sure, you've learned to master the construction of sentences, paragraphs and have even mastered the art of maintaining a coherent line of thought for the reader to follow throughout your article or short work of fiction. I'm not referring to intellectual tools you have obtained through training or by trial and error. I am discussing, rather, the physical tools you need to get the job done. You need more than a good personal computer or laptop with a decent spell/grammar check program to succeed as a writer. You need a little help from some trusted old friends.

The first friend I'd like to re-introduce to you is the dictionary. Yes. I know your PC has a spell checker and your grammar check program might even help you out with rewording a sentence that suffers structural issues. Neither of these sources is going to provide you with the meaning of a word. You can go with the tried-and-true book form of the dictionary or use one of the on-line versions. No good writer, however, is going to be caught in the process of working without one or the other handy.

The next of your four friends is another very familiar fellow. Roget's Thesaurus has been helping us find the right word or words for a very, very long time. Any thesaurus can prove to be an invaluable tool when you are in search of a word or feel like there is a better way to phrase something. Again, you can get either a hardbound book or a piece of software, but keep the thesaurus at the ready.

One friend that might not have come so easily to mind is a good book on English grammar. I prefer a very basic one that doesn't take you too far into the "depths of literary learning" and sticks to basics such as subject/verb agreement, punctuation and other grammatical bogeymen that must be dealt with regularly in this profession. It's surprising how often you'll feel more comfortable about the quality of a sentence or phrase if you spend five minutes assuring yourself that it meets the book's criteria for good grammar. While there are some decent grammar primers on-line, I'd stick with the book in this instance.

Finally, and this might not be a help to those of you who have great memories or exhaustive vocabularies, I like to keep a book that lists synonyms. Mine is an ancient out-of-print book from the 1960s. You can probably find one more up-to-date, and doubtlessly some enterprising individual has an on-line version. I use this book when I am forced to do a lot of repetitive writing and feel as if I'm using the same terminology over and over. The use of a synonym to replace a repeated term can open the work up and enliven the flow thought. It can also get you out of a mental bind.

So, keep your four friends handy. I am old-fashioned. I like to keep mine on my desk in worn, dog-eared book form. You might prefer on-line versions or software applications instead. The point is not what form you keep them in, but that you do keep them close by for easy reference. These are the sorts of tools that, as they are used, will enable you to improve your writing skills and, as such, will help you succeed in your endeavors.

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Books: Dickens found joy in ‘A Christmas Carol’

After years of writing feverishly, Charles Dickens desperately needed a break from his demanding schedule and money to finance a year abroad.

England's best-known author hoped "A Christmas Carol," a tale about ghosts haunting the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, would be his ticket to a yearlong Italian vacation for him, his wife, five children and servants.

"He lived very lavishly. He entertained very lavishly. ... Money was a concern," said Michael Slater, a London-based scholar and author of a new Dickens biography from Yale University Press.

But Dickens also had a nobler motivation. During "the hungry 1840s," rural people crowded into urban tenements and children worked under frightful conditions in factories and mines.

Read more ...

The Story Starter

This website provides 373,067,200 creative ideas and writer prompts for writers of all ages. All of the story starters are randomly created. This idea generator can be used for short stories, novels, plays, scripts, or just for fun.

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Creating imaginary languages and words in fantasy for children and young people


Creating languages and words is one of the most fun parts of writing fantasy. Careful, though! Incomprehensible gobbledygook can really put off readers, especially younger readers, but properly used, exotic names and fragments of other languages can really add to the rich and convincing texture of your book’s world. Here’s some tips based on my own experience.

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Psst! Secrets of a Best-Selling Hack: Basic Rules for Writing Fiction

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for this one ..
  • Steve Hely needed to know how to write very well in order to write as miserably as he does in “How I Became a Famous Novelist.” In a satirical novel that is a gag-packed assault on fictitious best-selling fiction, Mr. Hely, who has been a writer for David Letterman and “American Dad,” takes aim at genre after genre and manages to savage them all. You are invited to trawl the mass-market fiction in your local bookstore if you think Mr. Hely is making much up.