Peg Herring's Blog – June 2007 Archive (3)

A Simple One, But...

I used to teach high school, and that's a job where you see a range of writing skills, from pretty darned good to downright awful. One mistake often made but easily corrected is starting sentences with the same word over and over. Particularly in passages where things are happening to a protag, it's difficult to avoid repeating "He" or "She" or in the case of first-person narrative, "I" as the first word of a sentence. This isn't limited to student writing. I've seen some big-name authors,… Continue

Added by Peg Herring on June 27, 2007 at 11:22pm — No Comments

Favorite words

Almost everyone has "catch phrases" of conversation, repeated words or groups of words that we unconsciously use as fillers. As a speech teacher, I can't tell you how many "Ums" and "You knows" I've drawn to the attention of novice speakers. Those are easy to identify, but in writing we tend toward certain words, too. Sometimes they're qualifiers ("it seemed as if"), sometimes modifiers ("very"), sometimes just a word or phrase that somehow makes the writer comfortable. Mine is "just", and I…

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Added by Peg Herring on June 26, 2007 at 10:15pm — 1 Comment

Joining in

It seems to take a lot of writing to be a writer these days. Post on a blog, on several chat sites, and several forums. My posts tend to be things I've picked up having to do with communication and publishing. Stop back often and see if my tips help you!

Added by Peg Herring on June 26, 2007 at 7:46am — No Comments