Another tip for writers: A simple reminder about conjunctions.

Another writing tip, this one uses the phrase A WHITE BUS as a reminder about conjunctions with which you can begin dependent clauses. This helps to make our writing more interesting.


A dependent clause is a phrase that must be attached to an independent clause — a series of words that can stand on its own as a sentence — to make grammatical sense.


Below, you’ll find the words or phrases that the letters in A WHITE BUS represent, and sample sentences in which they’re employed.

A

1. “After dinner, we’ll go see a movie.”
2. “Although I’d rather not, I’ll make an exception.”
3. “As you know, she’s rather eccentric.”

W

4. “When we’re done, let’s get some ice cream.”
5. “Whenever I go, I try to see something I’ve never seen before.”
6. “Whether or not you agree, I think it looks fine.”
7. “Where I go, they always have sales.”
8. “Wherever I go, I try to enjoy myself.”
9. “While I’m there, I play music on a jukebox.”

H

10. “How is it that even though you go there all the time, you’ve never noticed that before?”

I

11. “If you find out, please let me know.”
12. “In case you hadn’t heard, I couldn’t care less.”
13. “In order to enjoy your trip, take your time and enjoy the sights.”

T

14. “That I like wearing red — that has never been in dispute.”
15. “Though I’m flexible, I draw the line about that.”

E

16. “Even if it is true, I’ll forgive him.”
17. “Even though I’d heard the song before, I hadn’t known who sang it.”
18. “Ever since I met her, I haven’t been able to think about anything else.”

B

19. “Because I’ve been there before, I’d rather go somewhere else.”
20. “Before I saw the house, I was ready to just rent an apartment.”

U

21. “Unless you’re willing to wait, you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
22. “Until we find it, we can’t leave.”

S

23. “Since then, I’ve had a different opinion of him.”
24. “So sure were you of your theory about them, you ignored evidence that you were wrong.”
25. “So that I’m sure I understand you, please repeat what you said.”

Author Norm Applegate: Into the Basement Shockwave

Source: Daily Writing Tips

Attention writers: 100 Words for Facial Expressions

Here's an excellent list of names to explain to your readers what you are saying about someone's facial expression. How many times to you use the same words? Well, spice it up, keep it interesting:

1. Absent: preoccupied 2. Agonized: as if in pain or tormented 3. Alluring: attractive, in the sense of arousing desire 4. Appealing: attractive, in the sense of encouraging goodwill and/or interest 5. Beatific: see blissful 6. Bilious: ill-natured 7. Black: angry or sad, or see hostile 8. Bleak: see grim and hopeless 9. Blinking: surprise, or lack of concern 10. Blissful: showing a state of happiness or divine contentment 11. Blithe: carefree, lighthearted, or heedlessly indifferent 12. Brooding: see anxious and gloomy 13. Bug eyed: frightened or surprised 14. Chagrined: humiliated or disappointed 15. Cheeky: cocky, insolent 16. Cheerless: sad 17. Choleric: hot-tempered, irate 18. Coy: flirtily playful, or evasive 19. Crestfallen: see despondent 20. Darkly: with depressed or malevolent feelings 21. Deadpan: expressionless, to conceal emotion or heighten humor 22. Dejected: see despondent 23. Derisive: see sardonic 24. Despondent: depressed or discouraged 25. Doleful: sad or afflicted 26. Dour: stern or obstinate; see also despondent 27. Downcast: see despondent 28. Dreamy: distracted by daydreaming or fantasizing 29. Ecstatic: delighted or entranced 30. Etched: see fixed 31. Faint: cowardly, weak, or barely perceptible 32. Fixed: concentrated or immobile 33. Furtive: stealthy 34. Gazing: staring intently 35. Glancing: staring briefly as if curious but evasive 36. Glaring: see hostile 37. Glazed: expressionless due to fatigue or confusion 38. Gloomy: see despondent and sullen 39. Glowering: annoyed or angry 40. Glowing: see radiant 41. Grim: see despondent; also, fatalistic or pessimistic 42. Grave: serious, expressing emotion due to loss or sadness 43. Haunted: frightened, worried, or guilty 44. Hopeless: depressed by a lack of encouragement or optimism 45. Hostile: aggressively angry, intimidating, or resistant 46. Hunted: tense as if worried about pursuit 47. Impassive: see deadpan 48. Inscrutable: mysterious, unreadable 49. Jeering: insulting or mocking 50. Languid: lazy or weak 51. Leering: see meaningful; also, sexually suggestive 52. Meaningful: to convey an implicit connotation or shared secret 53. Mild: easygoing 54. Mischievous: annoyingly or maliciously playful 55. Moody: see sullen 56. Pained: affected with discomfort or pain 57. Pallid: see wan 58. Peering: with curiosity or suspicion 59. Peeved: annoyed 60. Petulant: see cheeky and peeved 61. Pitying: sympathetic 62. Pleading: seeking apology or assistance 63. Pouting: see sullen 64. Quizzical: questioning or confused 65. Radiant: bright, happy 66. Roguish: see mischievous 67. Sanguine: bloodthirsty, confident 68. Sardonic: mocking 69. Scornful: contemptuous or mocking 70. Scowling: displeased or threatening 71. Searching: curious or suspicious 72. Set: see fixed 73. Shamefaced: ashamed or bashful 74. Slack-jawed: dumbfounded or surprised 75. Sly: cunning; see also furtive and mischievous 76. Snarling: surly 77. Sneering: see scornful 78. Somber: see grave 79. Sour: unpleasant 80. Stolid: inexpressive 81. Straight-faced: see deadpan 82. Sulky: see sullen 83. Sullen: resentful 84. Taunting: see jeering 85. Taut: high-strung 86. Tense: see taut 87. Tight: see pained and taut 88. Unblinking: see fixed 89. Vacant: blank or stupid looking 90. Veiled: see inscrutable 91. Wan: pale, sickly; see also faint 92. Wary: cautious or cunning 93. Wide eyed: frightened or surprised 94. Wild eyed: excited, frightened, or stressful 95. Wistful: yearning or sadly thoughtful 96. Withering: devastating; see also wrathful 97. Woeful: full of grief or lamentation 98. Wolfish: see leering and mischievous 99. Wrathful: indignant or vengeful 100. Wry: twisted or crooked to express cleverness or a dark or ironic feeling Author Norm Applegate: Into the Basement Shockwave

Improve Your Writing Right Now: 5 Steps

Lately I've been posting some tips to improve your writing, these five are excellent.


1. Avoid cliches like the plague: You can’t omit them altogether — and you shouldn’t try — but take care when recasting a tired word or phrase into something fresh and new. When calling attention to hypocrisy, instead of reciting the cliche “This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black,” you could write, “Keywords: pot, kettle, black.” You can also play with words, referring to an especially distraught drama queen as a trauma queen.


2. Avoid filler phrases: Delete content-free wording like “be that as it may,” “to all intents and purposes,” and “in the final analysis.” These prolix protrusions pop up naturally in speech to bridge a gap between one thought and the next, but although you’re forgiven for including them in a first draft, there’s no excuse for letting them pass inspection when you review your writing or edit someone else’s.


3. Avoid verbosity: Watch for wordy phrases like “in order to,” unnecessary words and phraseslike currently and “that is,” and smothered verbs (constructions in which a noun can be transformed into a verb, such as “offered an indication” when indicate will do.)


4. Avoid redundancies and repetition and saying the same thing twice: Take care to avoid doppleganger words in stock phrases — common, like filler phrases, to spoken language but inimical to good writing — like “actual fact” and “completely finished.”


5. Avoid repetitive sentence structure: Craft your prose in such a way that phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs flow smoothly (avoid a Dick-and-Jane style of writing reminiscent of text in primary-grade reading books) — and consider the visual impact of your writing.

Norm Applegate author of:

SHOCKWAVE

Into the Basement

Source: Dailywritingtips

5 Tips for Cleaning Up Your Writing

Here are five quantitative quick tips about improving your writing functionally, before you even get into improving the quality of your prose:

1. Always Use Serial Commas

The policy of preceding every item in a list but the last one with a comma is commonsensical (read a previous article about the serial comma). Confusion is possible when you don’t and highly unlikely when you do. What if, using a non-serial-comma style, you write about more than two things when one of the things consists of more than one part or ingredient? (“The choices are roast beef, turkey, and ham and cheese.”) Do you insert a serial comma for clarity (and introduce an inconsistency) or leave the sentence as is for readers to stumble on? Adherence to serial-comma style eliminates the dilemma.

2. Minimize Capitalization

Job titles are capitalized only before names. Names of academic majors aren’t capitalized unless they are already proper nouns, like names of languages (“English”) or references to regions (“Asian studies”). Generic names of entities (“the hospital,” “the organization,” and so on) are lowercased. Yes, capitalization is a minefield; when in doubt, look it up, and search on this site for “capitalization” for many articles on the topic (including this one).

3. Repair Comma Splices

A comma alone cannot separate two independent clauses in a sentence. Break the clauses into distinct sentences, or separate them with a semicolon or an em dash — or a comma and a conjunction (and, or, and so on) — but not with a comma alone. For more information on this topic read 5 Ways to Fix the Comma Splice.

4. Omit Extraneous Hyphens, and Insert Necessary Ones

“Decision making,” “problem solving,” and similar compound nouns require no hyphen, unless they precede a noun as a compound modifier (“decision-making procedure,” “problem-solving aptitude”). “Near collision” and other similar constructions don’t, either, with the same exception (“near-collision statistics”). Established compound modifiers usually don’t require a hyphen even before a noun (“high school student”). Confused? Here’s a simple rule: Look it up. (And check out this DailyWritingTips article and find others on the topic by searching on the site for “hyphens.”)

5. Limit Displays of Emphasis

Words can be italicized to indicate that they are being used to refer to themselves, not the things they stand for (“Note the word emphasis”), or to signal a foreign term (“Wunderbar” means “wonderful”), or to make sure the reader understands that something is really important. Words can be initial-capped to indicate irony or other humorous intent. (“The rent-a-cop exuded the air of an Authority Figure.”) Boldface is appropriate for introducing new vocabulary or otherwise calling attention to an unfamiliar term but is best limited to textbooks and guidebooks. But all-caps are invariably excessive, “scare quotes” are seldom necessary, and be judicious about otherwise calling attention to words and phrases.


Norm Applegate author of:


Shockwave


Into the Basement

Source: Dailywritingtips

5 Ways to Reduce Use of Prepositions

Here's a great article on improving your writing.


Prepositions, words that indicate relations between nouns, pronouns, and verbs (mostly small ones like for, in, of, on, to, and with but sometimes more substantial, as in the case of beneath or between), are often integral to a sentence, but writers can clutter sentences by being overly dependent on them. Here are five strategies for minimizing the number of prepositions you use:

1. Eliminate Prepositions by Using Active Voice

Shifting from passive voice to active voice, as in the revision of “The watch was obviously designed by a master craftsman” to “A master craftsman had obviously designed the watch” takes a preposition out of action. (But take care that the inversion of the sentence structure doesn’t incorrectly shift emphasis or diminish dramatic effect.)

2. Substitute an Adverb for a Prepositional Phrase

In the writer’s toolbox, adverbs are stronger tools than prepositional phrases. Revision of the sentence “The politician responded to the allegations with vehemence” to “The politician responded vehemently to the allegations” strengthens the thought and deletes the weak preposition with.

3. Use a Genitive in Place of a Prepositional Phrase

An easy test to help reduce the number of prepositions is to search for the genitive case, or a possessive form: If a sentence could use the genitive case but doesn’t, revise the sentence.
For example, “She was disturbed by the violent images in the movie” gains more impact (and loses a preposition) by reversing the sentence’s subject and object: “She was disturbed by the movie’s violent images.” (Combine this strategy with a shift from passive voice to active voice, and you jettison two prepositions and further strengthen the statement: “The movie’s violent images disturbed her.”)
Another use of this technique is to revise a phrase including a reference to a location within a location, as in “the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,” which can be more actively and efficiently rendered as “New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.”

4. Omit Prepositions by Eliminating Nominalizations

Writers and editors aid clarity and conciseness by uncovering nominalizations, otherwise known as buried, or smothered, verbs. In doing so, they also negate the need for a preposition.
For example, the sentence “Their attempt to provide a justification of the expense was unsuccessful,” simplified to “Their attempt to justify the expense was unsuccessful,” not only transforms the verb+article+nominalization clump “provide a justification” into the streamlined verb justify but also makes of unnecessary. (I originally wrote “but also makes the use of of unnecessary,” but then deleted the superfluous phrase “the use of” and thereby deleted a preposition.)

5. Delete Prepositional Phrases

Prepositional phrases (preposition+article+noun) provide context, but they’re not always necessary. In a sentence like “The best outcome for this scenario would be an incremental withdrawal,” note whether the meaning is clear without the phrase, and if so, strike it out: “The best outcome would be an incremental withdrawal.”

Author of:

Into the Basement

First to Die

Article for Dailywritingtips

10 Ways to Improve Your Writing

If you follow my blog you know I repost from "Writing Tips." This is one of the better suggestions. If you're editing, these ten tips offer excellent examples of re-arranging a sentence to add verity to your writing. I would even go so far to suggest using this as an author's checklist. When proofing your work see if there are sentences you can modify to give the reader a better experience.

English is a remarkably flexible language in terms of syntax, because a simple statement can be rendered in so many ways. Take, for example, the statement “I went for a walk,” and consider all the ways you can attach the additional information included in the statement, “I saw a dinosaur.” Here are just some of the most basic of many variations in syntactical organization:

1. Write the statements as consecutive sentences: “I went for a walk. I saw a dinosaur.”

2. Add the second statement to the first as a dependent clause: “I went for a walk and saw a dinosaur.” (The second statement does not stand on its own.)

3. Add the second statement to the first as an independent clause: “I went for a walk, and I saw a dinosaur.” (The second statement stands on its own, which means it can be separated into two sentences, as in the first example.)

4. Begin the sentence with a dependent marker that turns the initial statement into a modifying phrase that expands on the second statement: “While I was walking, I saw a dinosaur.”

5. Begin with the second statement and reword the first statement as a modifying phrase that follows it: “I saw a dinosaur on my walk this morning.”

6. Insert a nonessential phrase, which must be bracketed by commas, one of two ways: Locate the phrase between a pair of independent clauses (but after the coordinating conjunction), each consisting of one of the two statements: “I went for a walk and, to my surprise, I saw a dinosaur.” (Notice that “to my surprise,” which can be omitted without altering the sentence’s meaning, modifies the second statement and so must follow and; note, too, that the comma preceding the coordinating conjunction can be omitted.)

Or, separate two statements with a nonessential phrase inserted before the coordinating conjunction: “I went for a walk, following my usual route, and I saw a dinosaur.” (Notice that “following my usual route,” which also does not alter the sentence’s meaning if it is omitted, modifies the first statement and so must precede and.)

7. Emphasize a nonessential phrase by bracketing it with em dashes to indicate an interruption of thought: “I went for a walk and — no, I was not hallucinating — I saw a dinosaur.” (Alternatively, to deemphasize the phrase, or for humorous effect, enclose it in parentheses.)

8. Insert an essential clause — one whose absence would alter the meaning the sentence — between two statements: “I went for a walk that followed my usual route and saw a dinosaur.”

9. Attach a variation of the second statement to the first, preceded by a semicolon when the second statement is an independent clause that is nevertheless closely associated with the first one: “I went for a walk; a dinosaur was grazing along my route.”

10. Separate two statements with a semicolon when the second statement is preceded by an adverb or an adverbial phrase, which requires a subsequent comma: “I went for a walk; unexpectedly, I saw a dinosaur along the way.”

It is this rich variety of word and phrase order and variation in punctuation that makes prose — fiction or nonfiction — readable. As you review your writing, make sure that you vary sentence structure among these and other constructions to create a pleasant reading experience devoid of lockstep syntax — questionable enough for a Dick-and-Jane reading level, and deadly for more sophisticated readers.

Source: Dailywritingtips