Grammar Police Monday - Ensuring You Know Your English

I hope you don't mind covering commonly confused words again this week. These lessons are easy to throw together when scheduling blog posts ahead of time, and I needed a few to get me through the rest of the summer and make the first couple of back-to-school weeks less stressful.

Here we go... 

Captcha-Free Blog Buttons

I'm a woman on a mission...
To banish Captcha (aka 'word verification') from blogs.

To that end, I designed some blog buttons that advertise Captcha-Free-ness.  If you want to encourage visitors to follow your blog, then grab a blog button and put it in your sidebar.

How do you do that?

Fictional Amusement

One of my goals when I pre-scheduled July's posts was to keep at least SOME of them brief, but then I got tagged in a couple of memes, and one of the shortest posts ever in the history of my blog turned into two long ones (read: blame Carrie Butler). :P  I managed to sneak in a short one today. Maybe I'll be more successful in August...

Grammar Police Monday - What Do Band-aids, Lemonade & Nurse's Aides Have In Common?

They're all a source of comfort. And they all contain a homophone. 

Yep. We're covering more commonly confused words this week...

Random Stuff & Social Media

I thought I'd take a little detour from discussing the craft per se and talk about random stuff—my life, social media, my writing goals and the like. Skim the icons and read what interests you.

It's the middle of July. My son, the one with autism, has a half-day class for the next few weeks designed to work on his social skills and prepare him for middle school. His twin will be transferring to middle school, too, but from a home school setting. (Yup. I'm one of those weird homeschool moms.) In about six weeks, all three kids will be in public school, at the same time, for the first time in four years—my oldest a freshman in high school! I will miss them, but I will have some peaceful days to write. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Grammar Police Monday - I'm A Rebel Alright

Today I'm going to list sets of words that are the source of common errors in writing and explain each version and its proper usage.

The first set is anyone vs any one.

Anyone is an indefinite pronoun, whereas any one is an adjective phrase that refers to an unspecified thing or individual. One way to remember is you can use anyone when you mean anybody. 

Does anyone know who took Mary home?

There were over twenty people at the party. It could have been any one of them.

Next let's look at altogether and all together. The phrase all together means doing something collectively as a group, while the word altogether means entirely.

Magic 8 Ball Meme

I was tagged (Again!) by Carrie Butler, this time for The Magic 8 Ball Meme—a meme started by Jaycee DeLorenzo, the creator of the wildly popular Lucky 7. 

Carrie and Jaycee are two of seven awesome ladies who run NA Alley, a blog that's all about the flourishing New Adult genre.

 In short, here are the rules:

1. Post the button and link to http://blog.jayceedelorenzo.com (following would be nice, but not required).   Done & done.

2.  Share an excerpt from your current WIP, perhaps something you're struggling with, are stuck on, or just can't "get right."  

Be Inspired Meme

I was tagged by Carrie Butler on her blog So You’re A Writer for the Be Inspired meme. The instructions say to answer the following questions, and then tag five people. 

Here we go...

1. What is the name of your book?
Come Back

2. Where did the idea for your book come from?

If you are reading this...

the blog move was successful.

And the Follower gadget works now! Yipeee!!! :D

   

Grammar Police Monday - Of Language Arts & Potty Parts

Maybe a better title for this post is A Usage Error That Almost Resulted In a Usage Error. :D  Anyhow, this is a true story...

Deciding Who To Kill

Contrary to what you're probably thinking, this post is not about killing off characters. It's about a necessary act we writers all hate, know as murdering our little darlings—the act of deleting lines, scenes, and even chapters we love because they don't work with our story.

Grammar Police Monday - Weekly Dose Of Counsel

Today we're going to tackle a few more commonly confused words, also known as homophones. These are words that sound alike, are often spelled nearly alike, but have different meanings. In conversation, we sometimes get by with using the wrong one, but in text, the error is blatantly obvious.

First on the list: discreet vs discrete

Discreet means showing prudence in conduct, keeping quiet about things of a delicate nature, etc.

Discrete means apart, separate or distinct, and is sometimes used in math and science (e.g. a discrete variable).