Today’s entry is courtesy of goldenusagi who posted the following on her journal:

You know, when your first chapter contains nothing but word for word dialogue from the show, it's never a good sign. But not only is it boring and unnecessary, it makes it even more glaringly obvious that your own dialogue is extremely OOCAnd then, after I commented (and asked ( Read more... )

LOL - for those who haven't seen it yet: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/oxford-comma-dropped-by-university-of-oxford_b33357 The Oxford people have decided to disown their own comma (except when it's necessary for clarity ( Read more... )

Following on from hyphenation, here's some stuff on punctuation.

Hyphens
Are used to link some prefixes and suffixes (half-baked, post-operative, president-elect, etc.), modifiers (as discussed in the hyphen posts comments), and spelled-out numbers.

A hyphen is demonstrated in the above examples.

Dashes
Are different.

The En-dash
En-dashes are twice the ( Read more... )

A quick punctuation doozy for today ( Read more... )

As promised, based on someone’s comment yesterday, today’s doozy will address the dash and it’s use. (Yes, I know, I am probably the last person in the world to be talking about this because I sprinkle them everywhere. But, hey, according to my style manual, sometimes I’m even right ( Read more... )

Just a short doozy for today. Commas are tricky little critters - they don't go where you think the should, and they do go where you see no damn reason for them sometimes. But, there are some hard and fast rules about them, and the following is one of them ( Read more... )

Hi there - today's mini-lesson is on punctuating speech tags, which seem to cause a lot of questions and problems for people. I'm going to run through several different possible issues, as well as the basics. As always, I will be counting on our more edumacated members to pipe in as needed with corrections, additions, or support. LOL ( Read more... )