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Constance Hale Has a Crush on Verbs

I am thrilled to welcome wordsmith Constance Hale, bestselling author of Sin and Syntax and the just-released Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing. Constance is here to talk about … you guessed it: VERBS.

My Crush on Verbs By Constance Hale

How can a person write a whole book, just on […]

Colons: Don’t Let Them Be a Pain in Your Ass

The Editing Hour is back today with everything you want to know about colons. First, eat lots of fiber to keep your colon clean and, if you’re over 50, consider getting a colonoscopy to test for polyps and colorectal cancer, and oh, wait … wrong type of colon! Let’s try this again.

I’ve always followed […]

The Editing Hour: More Commonly Misused Words

If a person interested in food is a foodie, does that make us wordies? I’d say yes. And all you wordies out there may remember that I took a class at Editcetera called What’s New in Chicago 16 a couple of months ago, which outlined the differences between the 15th and 16th editions of The […]

On Bucks and Book Publishing

This week I have a guest post by […]

The Editing Hour: The Semicolon revisited

A quick note about semicolons. I’ve blogged about them before: how to use them to connect two independent clauses and alternatives you can use instead: a period and a capital or a comma and a coordinating conjunction, or FANBOYS. But what I didn’t say was use them sparingly. It’s tempting when you learn a new […]

The Editing Hour: Creative vs Academic Writing

When editing and critiquing submissions, the academic in me wants to copyedit every sentence until it’s grammatically and typographically perfect. That means, if I’m following the Chicago Manual of Style, I may want to add a comma before “and” in a series: “I love ice cream, cake, and pies.” Or I may want to make […]

The Editing Hour: The Semicolon

I love semicolons, when they’re used correctly. There are several ways to connect two independent clauses (ie complete sentences): using a coordinating conjunction or FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so), using a period and a capital, or using a semicolon. When using a semicolon, make sure the two sentences are closely related. They […]

For Fun: An Editing Quiz

I’ve been home with a cold the past couple of days, so here’s a fun editing quiz from the Times until I return tomorrow.

The Editing Hour: Commonly Misused Words

Last Monday’s post on “that” vs. “which” and “I” vs. “me” led to some interesting comments about other words people often confuse. Here is the list with a few more added. They’re in no particular order.

1. Irregardless—this is not a word! It’s regardless, regardless of how much emphasis you want to put on it.

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The Editing Hour: Usage and Punctuation

I am reluctant to get too much into copyediting because I am a stickler for grammatical and other errors, and I hate to get too caught up in that and lose sight of the more important things in a story like plot, dialogue, characters, etc. But here we go. A lot of common mistakes I […]