Are Pre Words Redundant? Pre is a prefix that means before. It’s fairly easy to understand and everyone I know of uses pre in one way or another. But are pre words redundant? preorder preboard preview prerecord pre-announce pre-arrange These are but a few of the pre words. There are many more. The problem I have with…
Formatting a Résumé If you want to know about formatting a résumé, the best way to do it is to make it as unobtrusive as possible. Don’t use special fonts or eccentric styling and, for God’s sake, don’t use pictures. Make the résumé as plain and simple as you can. The content is what’s important…
“Absolutely” Is Absolutely Wrong It’s a well-known fact that absolutely is absolutely wrong. Well, for some people it is. And what makes it worse, is that people often use it as an intensifier for another absolute. I wrote about absolutes before. You can read about them here. Even the dictionaries have succumbed to popular and…
The Best Mystery Book What makes the best mystery book? Ask ten people and you’ll likely get some overlap, but I’d be willing to bet you’d get at least 7 different opinions. Some might say it’s the dialogue that keeps them turning pages; others would swear it’s the character development; while a few may proclaim…
Am I Grateful or Thankful I’ve had several people write to me about whether to use grateful or thankful, wondering when to use each word. My typical response of verifying my thoughts with a good dictionary and then presenting those people with answers didn’t work, mostly because the dictionaries seemed as confused as those people…
How Other Languages Affect Ours If you’ve ever wondered how other languages affect ours—wonder no more. All you have to do is look at a calendar, or think about it when you wonder “Where do the months of the year names come from?” Did you ever wonder where we got the names for the months…
Dead to Rights I don’t know how many of you have even heard of this expression. But where I grew up, dead to rights was common usage—everyone knew what it meant. But it wasn’t until I used the saying in one of my books that my editor flagged it, as she didn’t know what the…
Dialogue Tags — Make Your Dialogue Shine What Are Dialogue Tags and When Is It Best to Use Them? People, meaning writers, seem to mess this up a whole lot. In an attempt to sound “writerly” or make it appear as if they are experienced authors, they use ridiculous dialogue tags when they shouldn’t. If…
Compare to and Compare With Some authors claim that compare to versus compare with is a useless argument–that they mean essentially the same thing, but this is not supported by actual data. The verb compare has several different meanings, some of which take the preposition “to”, while the others take “with”: Compare A to B…
Using Images With Text Expander™ We all know by now how amazing Text Expander™ is when typing, and how much time it will save you, but what you might not know is how valuable it can be when using images. What do I mean by that? Simple. If I type ‘vellumimage’ (without the quotes), it…