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Posted on Thursday, May 17, 2012 3:42 PM
Yesterday I offered you some "big" words. Today, I have some "little" ones. Do you remember homonyms? Those pesky little words that sound exactly alike by are spelled in several different ways and had several different meanings? In grade school I had a teacher who loved them. During quite periods, she taught us to play a game in which we made up sentences containing homonyms but substituted the word "teakettle" for the words themselves. The challenge was for the other students to identify the missing homonym. The sentences sounded like this: "I teakettle would like teakettle eat teakettle pieces of cake."
The game was just childish silliness, but it's not funny when a writer gets wrapped up in her story and types one homonym for another without noticing. Maybe you are writing a sympathetic description of an admirable politician who suffered from great depravation -- or did you really mean to type deprivation? There's not a spell checker in the world who will catch an error like that. And there's no sure way to avoid making the occasional goof. About all you can do is take time to think about the words that cause you trouble. Here's a baker's dozen that may trip you up when you are busily touch-typing.
• Cite (to summon, to quote, to refer to), Site (place, situation), Sight (view) • Council (administrative or advisory group), Counsel (to advise, advice) • Desert (waterless region, to abandon), Dessert (last course of a meal) • Dew (moisture), Do (perform), Due (owed) • Gait (manner of walking, Gate (door) • Grate (iron frame), Great (large, magnificent) • Haul (pull, carry, transport), Hall (passageway, large room) • Here (in this place), Hear (to perceive sound, to sit in judgment) • Idol (image, object of adoration), Idle (not busy), Idyl (poem) • Leak (hole, to drain out of), Leek (vegetable) • Made (created), Maid (domestic servant, unmarried woman) • Meat (animal flesh food), Meet (a gathering, to encounter, to convene) • Morning (before noon), Mourning (grieving, to grieve)
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Posted on Monday, April 02, 2012 9:28 AM
I've been in editing mode for several days now, so I decided it was time for readers to join me. In The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese, chapters 12 through 14 cover the kinds of silly grammatical errors we all make when writing.
Here’s a list of little words you
don’t need. Try reading each sentence without that extra word. Don’t they all
sound better?
•
SO (as in “I was so glad to see him.”) There’s an exception here: “so”
is acceptable only when it is followed by a “that”—as in “She was SO short THAT
she only saw people from the waist down.” •
VERY (as in “I was very, very tired.”) •
THAT (as in (“I thought that I should leave.” ) •
ALTHOUGH (“Although, I’m not sure I should.””) •
JUST (“I was just beginning to get sleepy.”) •
YET (“She hasn’t arrived yet.”) •
RATHER (“It seemed rather rude.”) •
EVEN (“Even the other guests were bored.”) •
SORT OF (“The milk was sort of soured.”) •
IN SPITE OF (“I was irritated in spite of myself.”) •
PERHAPS (“I could, perhaps, take a nap.”) •
QUITE (“I was quite tempted to do it.”) •
FOR A MOMENT (“I hesitated for a moment.”) •
THEN (“Then I walked out.”) •
SUDDENLY (“Suddenly I stopped.”) •
ALMOST (“The roast beef was almost burned.”)
I copied the list from another
blogger several years ago, and I’ve used it ever since. Once your manuscript is
complete, go to the “find and replace” function in your word processor, and
scan the whole manuscript for each word. That means you’ll go through the whole
manuscript about eighteen times, but you’ll be surprised at how many other
errors you’ll spot along the way.
Every time you find one of the words on the list, ask
yourself if the meaning of the sentence changes when you take the word out. If
it doesn’t, drop it.
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Posted on Monday, February 06, 2012 5:47 PM
Sometimes I just have to shake my head and move on. Recently I've been trying to add to my small business's staff by hiring an accountant and an editor. (If you missed my blog about why every self-publisher needs a staff, you can find it here) In both cases, I started by taking the recommendations of friends. I should have known better!
Case #1: The Accountant. She "welcomed my business", but never had time to meet with me. Meanwhile, I was sweating the fact that my book sales had added thousands of dollars to our income, without any deductions coming out of them. I knew I was going to owe self-employment taxes at least, and we might also be hit with a fine for not submitting quarterly estimated payments to cover the difference.
As January 17 got closer, I again asked for an appointment, which she made, and then cancelled twice. On the third appointed day, I arrived at her office with all my paperwork in hand, only to be told she was "out of town." Her receptionist offered to call her, and I had the dubious pleasure of listening to her sputter an apology. "Leave the paperwork there," she said. "I'll be back in the office tomorrow, I'll look it over, and call you." Right! She finally called on the Saturday afternoon before the deadline to say she didn't have time to go through the paperwork. Her recommendation: Send the IRS $2000 or more, and they'll be happy. Then, she said she would file to get me an extension on paying my taxes in April. Bottom line: "Call me back at the end of April, and we'll try to find a time to go over all this before the October deadline.
FAIL!
Instead, I found myself a new accountant -- one recommended by the Chamber of Commerce. He was polite and accommodating, offering a whole afternoon to get us straightened out. Thank you, Kind Accountant, for treating me as if my business is important.
Case #2: The Editor. She was excited to read the first three chapters of my book -- until she read them. Then back came the critique. "You seem to want your historical novel to be historically accurate, but all these details are going to bore your reader, as they do me. I prefer to work on a story line that has lots of action and excitement. I can do an edit on these pages and put in some more exciting events, but you'll have to start all over again to write the kind of book I produce."
FAIL!
I had told her that I am a historian and that the book is based on a real person. Sorry, but we can't put car chases, explosions, and terrorist threats into a Civil War novel. So I found a new editor, too -- one who found the real story interesting and promised to help me polish the book I wanted to write.
It's been an interesting couple of weeks! I'm trying to put a positive spin on the experiences. After all, I did end up with two wonderful additions to the "staff." But what on earth is wrong with people who offer their "services for hire" but don't want to serve the people who hire them?
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Posted on Saturday, February 04, 2012 2:16 PM
Yesterday, I finally hired an editor for my upcoming novel. Then I worried about sending her the first chapters without doing a quick edit myself to catch the really dumb mistakes. After a couple of hours of editing this morning, I took a break, but I couldn't get away from grammar and punctuation. On Facebook I found people playing a new game: creating bar jokes involving grammar and punctuation. So here, for your enjoyment -- or befuzzlement -- are some of the best ones I discovered.
- A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
- A question mark walks into a bar?
- Two "quotation marks" walk into a bar.
- The bar was walked into by a passive verb.
- Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave.
- A spell checker want into a bar and preceeded to get waisted.
- A worn out simile went into a bar, had a shot and a Red Bull chaser, and then ran like a bat out of hell.
- A subordinating conjunction walked into a bar because it was thirsty.
- A colon walks into a bar for one reason: to drink.
- A split infinitive decides to boldly walk into a bar.
- Always a verb in a bar.
- An adverb walks into a bar thirstily.
- A run on sentence walks into a bar and sits and drinks and leaves and comes back again and has too much to drink and stumbles out of the bar and returns again unable to stop its on going drinking habit which it learned to do the first time it went into the bar to sit down and drink and leave if only for a moment.
- Being well fried, the Dangling Modifiers enjoyed the pork chops.
- An ellipsis walks into a bar…
- A palindrome walks up to a girl in a bar and says, "Madam, I'm Adam."
- An unnecessary Oxford comma walks into a bar, drinks, and leaves.
- A conjunction joined two phrases at a bar.
How many of them did you understand? That's why every writer needs an editor!
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Posted on Tuesday, November 22, 2011 12:16 PM
 I'm in the midst of a busy day. Proofs have arrived, asking me to make decisions about my new book cover and its interior layouts. Here's the cover I've chosen. Layouts will take a bit more work. These are exciting days, and I'm trying not to push ahead too fast. The temptation is to get the book out as soon as possible to catch the holiday shopping frenzy that is sure to erupt as soon as everyone has finished eating turkey. But since I don't want to publish a "turkey" I'm trying to slow down and edit carefully.
In the meantime the IHR Virtual Conference on Historical Fiction is in full swing. Here's a brief summary of today's events.
There's been a lot going on today. Starting with Elizabeth Chadwick's research
into why readers of historical fiction enjoy the genre conversation
moved onto questions of why academic history is perceived to not be able
to recreate the human condition adequately. We then heard from Justin Champion, Tracey Loughran and Peter Straus.
In these papers, amongst much else, the issue of e-book readers came up
and in other conversations the rise of the internet was discussed as
revolutionising the communication and interaction between author and
reader.
It
seems that historical fiction is regarded as a popular form of writing
and reading about the past, leaving academic history failing somewhat in
its targets for impact! However, the inter-relationship of the two are
time and again shown to be strong - one could not survive without the
other. I suspect we'll return to that topic tomorrow as we look at the
differences and similarities between historical fiction and academic
history.
Elsewhere, Jenny Benham's book review focused
on Swedish historical fiction is a gentle and much welcome reminder
that in this conference so far we have largely talked about British and
perhaps a little American historical fiction. What about elsewhere? It
would be great to see if anyone else has any views on non-English
historical fiction!
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