Part of writing is asking for feedback. At some point you have to let go of the precious baby and let someone take a look at it. Pick someone you trust but also someone who will challenge you to do better.
I was planning on continuing our adventurous foray into the modern use of Latin, but then one of my coworkers sent me this screengrab from her Facebook news feed, and I immediately knew I had to share this with all of you.
Who can pick out the mistake here? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the semicolon. That’s actually being used properly.
So, you’ve completed a first draft. Huzzah, and kudos to you! Take a bow, pat yourself on the back, do something else that indicates you’re proud of yourself.
OK, the moonwalk was a bit much. Nice moves, though.
But now, it’s revision time. Maybe you were on a hot streak at the Writing Time Casino and you’ve produced a first draft that’s almost perfect. Enjoy that moment of triumph.
We’ve covered a lot of the minutiae of grammar on the Write Practice, but today we’re taking it back to the basics and running through some of the most fundamental parts of speech.
What is a part of speech? A part of speech is a category of words that serve the same basic function in a sentence, and today, we’re covering the most basic of the basics: subjects and predicates.
This is a guest post by Emily Wenstrom (@emilywenstrom).
When I completed the first draft of my first-ever novel last December, I promptly did a little victory dance.
And then I sat back down and took the word count, which completely killed my buzz. My manuscript rang in at little over 45,000—half the length of your average novel. Eep! I had a minor freakout. What was I going to do?
But fortunately, rationality eventually returned. This was only a first draft, after all. Surely there was some room for development. Turns out, there was tons.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, here are five of the best ways I’ve discovered to beef up your word count without diluting your story.
The Olympics start on Friday. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am excited beyond reason. I’m especially excited about the Olympic speedwalking. Yes, it’s a real event, and you need to Youtube it immediately. You can thank me later. I don’t think there’s really a way that I could’ve expressed my enthusiasm adequately.
And yes, could’ve is an acceptable contraction. What is not acceptable is saying “could of” instead, because that is just plain wrong.
