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Tuesday, 19 September 2006

Writing tips

Here's a helpful list of the ten most common grammatical mistakes to avoid if you want your writing to be taken seriously. (And can I add the unfortunately frequent use of "publically" for "publicly"?) [Hat tip Stephen Hicks]

And here's ten useful tips to help you get that writing project done. Tip #4:
Stop with the blog already. When I’m pressed for time, distractions like blogging and hoovering become very compelling. Knowing this makes it easier to resist...
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6 comments:

  1. Berend de Boer19 Sept 2006, 14:23:00

    Eh, what's that first one? Loose seems correct to me. Please you real writers, tell me if I'm wrong here.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Josh19 Sept 2006, 15:04:00

    Nope, "loose" is pronounced with a soft "s", and means "not tight" as an adjective or "set loose" as a verb.

    "Lose" is pronounced with a hard
    "s" and means "misplace".

    Therefore, "I always loose the product key" makes no sense, unless you keep your produut keys chained up and set them on unwanted visitors...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous19 Sept 2006, 16:15:00

    I rely heavily on my Microsoft word to correct my spellings and also re-organise the words within sentences (natural language processing - NLP). As technology of NLP improved (which is already happening), human will rely less & less on their typing of mispelling words, grammatical errors, words natural flow, etc,.. because machine will do it on behalf of the user.

    ReplyDelete
  4. leelion19 Sept 2006, 20:37:00

    thanks for these links, great stuff

    ReplyDelete
  5. Berend de Boer19 Sept 2006, 21:24:00

    Thanks Josh.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous20 Sept 2006, 09:33:00

    No. 11: Fewer versus less. Drives me nuts.

    And spotted in Kilmore Street, Chch:

    Sovereign Hotel.
    Superior Accomodation

    (Also on a sign on the western side of Ohakune. Ya.)

    ReplyDelete

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