January 28, 2008 at 11:10 am · Filed under suggestions
Many of us are frequent offenders of this crime. We fill sentences with long and redundant words. We do this to make it sound like we know what we’re talking about (when we really don’t) or to fill the page with words. Or, we somehow feel that using long wordy sentences will make us sound more professional.
Stop writing long sentences just for the sake of being long! The best writers will agree that the shorter and more direct the sentence is, the better. The purpose of sentences is to get a thought across to the reader. If you have more than one thought in a sentence, chances are that you need two sentences (or a comma if the two thoughts are related).
Here’s a good blog post about this topic.
January 24, 2008 at 11:36 pm · Filed under goof ups
The media has covered the writers strike in great detail (read as “gone overboard”). However, many well known media outlets continue to misspell the phrase.
Using an apostrophe in “writer’s strike” implies that the strike belongs to writers (which it technically does). However, the term “writers” in “writers strike” is used as an adjective to describe the type of strike that is taking place, viz. a strike for writers. Technically speaking, an adjective cannot be possessive. Therefore…
…no apostrophe is required. Instead, it should be “writers strike” just as a strike held for teachers is a “teachers strike.”
More details to convince you that this is true can be found here.
