Tag Archives: #Editing

Said Versus Asked

I had to weight in here because this literally drives me nuts: said is used for a statement while asked is used when posing a question. Pease stop using said with a question mark as it is NOT proper no matter what the new trends are. Question marks are punctuation used to indicated interrogative clauses or phrases. Essentially, these are

Read more

Assume Versus Presume

It is easy to misuse words, and slang doesn’t help. Colloquialisms aside, when you are writing or editing, it is important to understand the rules, even when you intend to break them. So, what’s the proper way to use ASSUME versus PRESUME? Let’s find out… The simplest answer is this: ASSUME (a verb meaning “to suppose“): is when you believe

Read more

Either / Or versus Neither / Nor

Often, people confuse either and neither. Since these are connected to or and nor, I decided to include these with this post, as well. My husband and I had a recent conversation where this came up. The simplest way to put this is that either is always used with or and neither with nor. Either / or is used when

Read more

All Right vs Alright

Essentially, it all comes down to this: ALL RIGHT is the formal version and ALRIGHT is the informal version of the same word. As an editor and writer, I would both advise and use ALL RIGHT in omnipresence narration (when the character isn’t narrating the story) and ALRIGHT in dialogue or instances of colloquialism. With formal editing and publishing written

Read more

Blond vs Blonde

Grammatical gender is found in most languages though it has been mostly removed from the English language. However, there are still some remnants of it. We see this with Blond and Blonde. Grammarly does a great job simplifying this: “When describing males, you would use blond: He is blond. You can add an E to blond when you describe females:

Read more

Do I Need A Comma Before A Name?

Often, writers struggle with commas. It begins in elementary school when we are told a “rule of thumb” that seems to become ingrained in our minds: when you read aloud, if you pause, use a comma. However, there are truly hard rules to commas, and what we were initially told is not accurate. One place of note is when dealing

Read more
« Older Entries