Write How You Write, Not How You Speak

 

Inspect your writing for anything that smacks of spoken English.

If you’ve ever seen a transcript of an extended discourse -- a written record of someone’s comments, rather than the prepared script for a speech -- you’ll understand how widely spoken and written English can diverge.

Spontaneous speech, at least, is riddled with qualifications and equivocations. It’s easy enough to dispose of “um”s and “uh”s, “well”s and “you know”s when converting a transcript to an essay, but writers should purge their prose of other utterances, words, and phrases as well that add a lot to a word count but little to a description or an argument. (See this post, for instance, for a list of adjectival intensifiers and their adverbial forms to avoid.)

In addition, omit hedging phrases such as “as I see it,” “from my point of view,” “in my opinion,” and “it seems to me.” Search and destroy such pompous filler as “be that as it may” or “other things being equal.” These are all understandable (though not necessarily forgivable) indulgences in spoken English, whether impromptu or rehearsed -- at best, they’re nearly meaningless phrases one tosses off while thinking of what to say next, and at worst, they clutter a speech, distracting and discouraging listeners. But readers expect your prose to be direct and dynamic, and there’s no place for such self-gratification in written form.

From: Daily Writing Tips

Uses of Do

  “Do” is used with the simple present form of the verb to make a question: “Do you like pizza?” But I have seen “do” used with the “-ing” form of the verb:

“Does closing a scheme for new money pay off?”
“Does shutting furnace vents improve efficiency?”
“Does doing a tattoo hurt?”

Please explain.

Do may be used as either a main verb or as a helping verb. Its forms are do, did, (have) done, doing.

As a main verb, do means “to carry out some action.”

What shall I do about the spoiled fruit? (main verb)
Mr. Baxter does odd jobs. (main verb)
She did all the cleaning for her mother. (main verb)

As a helping verb, do is used to pose questions:

Do you live in the neighborhood? (The main verb is “do live.”)
Does your dog know the basic commands? (The main verb is “does know.”)
Didn’t I see you at the Court House yesterday? (The main verb is “did see.”

Do is used both to frame a negative statement and to contradict a negative statement:

A: I don’t think you know Charley. (negative statement)
B: I do know him. (contradiction)

A: I don’t think Mrs. Wong turned off the lights last night. (negative statement)
B: She did turn them off. (contradiction)

Do is used for emphasis:

I do love chocolate chip cookies!
Jack certainly does love his Monday night football!

The form doing can be used with a helping verb to form a main verb, as in “She was doing her best not to cry,” but in the examples that puzzle the reader, the -ing form doing is not part of the verb. It is a noun (gerund):

Does closing a scheme for new money pay off? (The verb is “does pay off.” The subject is “closing a scheme for new money.”)

Does shutting furnace vents improve efficiency? (The verb is “does improve.” The subject is “shutting furnace vents.”)

Does doing a tattoo hurt? (The verb is “does hurt.” The subject is “doing a tattoo.”

In some contexts, the verb do cannot be replaced. For example, “What shall I do?” But in many others, it can be replaced by a more specific verb. For example, “I’m doing the dishes” can be rephrased as “I’m washing the dishes.”

Here are some common expressions that use do as a main verb:

do a favor
do well/do badly
do good/do evil
do damage
do homework
do housework
do nothing
do research
do something
do the math
do one’s best
do 70 miles an hour
do time (serve a prison sentence)

From: Daily Writing Tips

Using Gerunds

Gerunds After a Preposition

A preposition explains a relationship with space or time and modifies the words that come after it. Prepositions include "to," "in," "at," "on," "since," "up," "down," "under," and many others. In order to use a verb properly after a preposition, it must be used as a gerund. (Unless using the preposition "but." Sorry, English is tricky.)

In these examples, the preposition is in italics and the gerund is in bold.

Study hard before taking your exams.

She delivered the joke without laughing.

After riding the bus to work, I stopped for coffee.  

Gerunds can also be used after a noun plus a preposition.

TV shows about cooking are becoming more popular.

And after an adjective plus a preposition.

I’m tired of waking up at 5 a.m. every day.

She’s sad about having to cancel her show.

Gerunds in the Present Simple Tense

The present simple tense is used in English to talk about things that are true at the moment. For example, gerunds could be used to discuss things that someone likes or dislikes.

She doesn’t like driving.

They love hiking!

Gerunds could also be used to talk about things you remember.

I remember watching that show when I was a kid.

Do you recall using a rotary phone?

Gerunds can be used to talk about things being attempted in the present.

I’m trying to learn how to skateboard.

She’s trying to knit a scarf.

It’s common to use gerunds when discussing feelings of remorse or regret.

He regrets not studying abroad while in college.

They regret wearing flip-flops today — it was so cold!

Gerunds as the Subject in a Sentence

When using a gerund as the subject in a sentence, you’ll spot it at the beginning.

Having breakfast in the morning is an important part of a healthy lifestyle.

Staying up too late can cause you to be sleepy the next day.

Traveling can expose you to different ideas and experiences.

 

 

Irregular Verbs

The simple answer is: Any verb that doesn't follow standard rules of conjugation. Unfortunately, there are so many "irregular" verbs in the English language that the title doesn't really make sense. These grammar anomalies have been lurking in plain sight for years, and they might just come naturally to you, but we're still going to take a closer look.

Irregular Verbs and the Past Tense

Typically, it's correct (and easy enough) to say the past tense of a verb ends in an "-ed." For example, “I drop the kids off in the morning” in the present tense becomes, “I dropped the kids off this morning.” Or, “I scrub the dishes,” in the present changes to “I scrubbed the dishes” in the past tense. Those two letters added to the end of a word are a pretty good indicator of past tense.

Then you come across a verb like "speak." In the present tense, you’d say, “I speak.” In the past tense, you would not say, “I speaked.” Instead, you’d say, “I spoke.”

Boom. You’ve just found an irregular verb. As you might have guessed, irregular verbs break the standard rule of ending in "-ed" in the past tense.

To further confuse the issue, irregular verbs have no discernible pattern themselves. They're just ... irregular. These irregular verbs are some of the most commonly used in English — "go," "say," "see," "think," "make," "take," "come," and "know." These workhorse verbs take on different spellings in the past tense.

In general, irregular verbs are easy enough to spot in the past tense — if it doesn’t end in "-ed," it’s irregular.

Spotting More Irregular Verbs

Test yourself: Which of these examples of irregular verbs are correct?

1. She drunk the glass of water.
2. The phone rung and rung.
3. The pants shrunk in the dryer.

Answer: Only number three is correct. In one, the correct past tense is "drank," and in number two, the phone "rang."

It’s still quite easy to get confused by irregular verbs, especially when you look at the difference between simple past tense and past participles.

For example, “Stacy drived to the public pool where she swum for hours.” Hopefully this sounds wrong to your ears, because it’s just an irregular mess.

There are two irregular verbs in this example, but neither is correct. The first is obvious – "drived" attempts to follow the regular verb "-ed" ending. It sounds awkward, because it’s not a real word at all. The correct (irregular) past tense is "drove."

The second one is a little trickier. "Swum" is in fact the past participle of the verb "to swim," but it's not the simple past, which is "swam."

The correct version of Stacy's day at the pool is, “Stacy drove to the public pool where she swam for hours.”

As confusing as irregular verbs may seem, they start to come naturally with practice. What irregular verbs do you still stumble over?

 

16 Substitutes for “Because” or “Because Of”

 

Many words or phrases can be used to set up an explanation. The most common is because (or “because of”), but others have their uses. Here are alternatives and a discussion of their uses and their merits.

1. As: As is a direct synonym for because (for example, “He opted not to go see the movie, as it had gotten poor reviews”), but it’s inferior.

2. As a result of: This phrase is a substitute for “because of,” not because, as in “As a result of his intervention, the case was reopened and they were ultimately exonerated.”

3. As long as: This informal equivalent of because is used to express the thought that given that one thing is occurring or will occur or is true, another is possible, in such statements as “As long as you’re going, could you pick some things up for me?”

4. Being as (or being as how or being that): This phrase has the same sense -- and the same formality -- as “as long as.”

5. Considering that: This phrase is essentially identical in meaning to “as long as” and “being as” and its variants.

6. Due to: Like “as a result of,” “due to” is a preposition, rather than a conjunction like because, and is used in place not of because alone but instead of “because of.” It applies specifically to an explanation of why something occurred or will or will not occur, as in “Due to the large number of applications, we cannot respond individually to each applicant.”

7. For: This substitute for because is reserved for poetic usage, as in “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

8. Inasmuch as: This phrase is a very formal equivalent of because, as in “Inasmuch as his account has been discredited, I wouldn’t believe anything else he says.”

9. In view of the fact that: This phrase is identical in sense to “inasmuch as.”

10. Now that: This phrase informally connotes cause and effect, as in “Now that you’re here, we can proceed.”

11. Out of: This phrase applies to explanations of emotion or feeling -- for example, “She asked out of compassion” or “Out of spite, I refrained from passing the message along.”

12. Owing to: This phrase is equivalent to “due to”; the two choices are more formal than “because of.”

13. Seeing that: This phrase is identical to “considering that.”

14. Since: This alternative to because is informal and is considered inferior because since primarily refers to elapsed time and the usage might be confused, as in “Since it had rained, we didn’t need to water the garden”; the reader might not realize until reading the second half of the sentence that the sense is causal rather than temporal.

15. Thanks to: This equivalent of “because of,” despite the wording, can apply to either a positive or a negative outcome; “Thanks to your meddling, we’re receiving much unwanted attention” demonstrates the latter sense.

16. Through: Through is a preposition; it takes the place of “because of,” as in “Through the efforts of these charities, the city’s homeless services have been reinstated.”

 

From: Daily Writing Tips If you would like a subscription to Daily Writing Tips please go to https://www.dailywritingtips.com/pro/?r=nal

15 Clichés To Avoid With a Ten-Foot Pole

Trite, hackneyed, tired — there are plenty of words to describe an overuse of clichés in your writing or speech. While they can be an easy way to express yourself, more often than not they're a crutch, a sign of linguistic laziness. Start digging deeper into your vocabulary and leave these 15 clichés behind.

What Is a Cliché and Why Is It So Bad?

A cliché is a phrase that has been beaten to death (that's a cliché). Because it’s been so overused, any significant meaning it may have had has been lost. Instead of adding color and interest to your writing, you often wind up sounding corny.

If you’re writing about how scrappy entrepreneurs are achieving success, that message was lost the minute you wrote “survival of the fittest.” Charles Darwin sounded original in his theory of evolution; you just sound clichéd.

How To Avoid Clichés

Words are powerful. But clichés are so overused they have lost authority. Unfortunately, clichés are so ubiquitous that you may not even realize when they sneak into your writing.

The best way to cut clichés out of your vocabulary is to proofread, proofread, and proofread again. Take a break and get away from your work before you take one last pass to remove clichés. Even better, ask someone to edit your work. An editor who isn’t too emotionally close to your prose can eliminate your clichés.

Removing clichés will tighten up your writing and make your work more specific and descriptive. Avoid flowery descriptions and instead strive to make your writing more accessible.

Pull out a thesaurus to find good alternatives. Instead of “in this day and age,” just say “today.” Avoid “pros and cons” and try a descriptor specific to your argument — maybe "assets and liabilities" or “costs and benefits” instead.

The hardest part about cutting clichés is they are so widely known they just fall off the tip of your tongue (cliché). If you spot any of these phrases in your writing, pull out your red pen (another cliché).

Writing on the wall

Whirlwind tour

Patience of Job

Never a dull moment

Sands of time

Paying the piper

March of history

Hook, line, and sinker

Long arm of the law

In the nick of time

Leave no stone unturned

Fall on deaf ears

Cool as a cucumber

Cry over spilled milk

Champing at the bit

Photo credit: Ananth Pai/ Unsplash

 

10 Varieties of Linguistic Siamese Twins

 

One of the most intriguing aspects of idiomatic phrases is their fixed nature, an aspect acknowledged in two terms for the class of idioms distinguished by the use of the conjunction and or the conjunction or between the constituent words: irreversible binomials and freezes. (They are also referred to as binomials or binomial pairs, or are identified by the colloquial expression “Siamese twins.”)

Ten sometimes overlapping variations of linguistic Siamese twins (which, because they are often clichés, should be used with caution) follow, including a category for triplets:

1. Binomials connected with and include “alive and well,” “nuts and bolts,” and “skin and bone.”

2. Binomials connected with or include “give or take,” “more or less,” and “win or lose.”

3. Binomials connected with other words include “dawn till dusk,” “front to back,” “head over heels.”

4. Binomials that contain opposites or antonyms include “days and nights,” “high or low,” and “up and down.”

5. Binomials that contain related words or synonyms include “house and home,” “leaps and bounds,” and “prim and proper.”

6. Binomials that contain alliteration include “friend or foe,” “rant and rave,” and “tried and true.”

7. Binomials that contain numbers include “four or five” -- note that the linguistic convention is to always state the lower number first (a figurative idiom is this category is “at sixes and sevens,” meaning “in a confused state”)

8. Binomials that contain similar-sounding words: “doom and gloom,” “out and about,” and “wear and tear.” This category includes rhyming slang, in which a word or phrase is slang code for a word that rhymes with the second binomial term in the phrase (even though only the first binomial term may constitute the slang) and is either random, as in minces, from “mince pies,” for eyes, or suggestive, as in trouble, from “trouble and strife,” for wife.

9. Binomials that contain exact or near repetition include “dog eat dog,” “kill or be killed,” or “neck and neck.”

10. Trinomials, which contain three terms, include “blood, sweat, and tears,” “left, right, and center,” and “win, lose, and draw.”

Take care, when using these clichés, to reproduce them correctly (unless you are deliberately -- and obviously -- distorting them for emphatic or humorous effect, as when referring to fashionably ripped jeans as “tear and wear”) so that erroneous usage does not have a negative impact on your overall message.

From: Daily Writing Tips

Three Cases of Complicated Parenthetical Punctuation

Inserting additional information into a sentence without careful consideration of sentence organization can create barriers to comprehension, especially when the parenthesis is complicated. Here are several sentences in which complex parenthetical phrases are not treated with care, followed by discussion and revision.
1. Consumers have the right to speak out or complain, and to seek compensation—payment or a replacement item—or redress—have a wrong corrected.
Here, the use of dashes to set off a pair of parenthetical phrases confuses the reader’s eye; use mirror-image parenthetical marks instead for a clearer picture of the sentence’s syntactical organization: “Consumers have the right to speak out or complain, and to seek compensation (payment or a replacement item) or redress (have a wrong corrected).”
2. They had an unwavering belief that they simply could not—or maybe more accurately stated, would not—be defeated.
Because “maybe more accurately stated” is a parenthesis within a parenthesis, a comma must precede as well as follow it: “They had an unwavering belief that they simply could not—or, maybe more accurately stated, would not—be defeated.”
3. If thorough controls are not in place, over time, as updates and changes are made to your environment, conflicts are likely to arise, posing varying levels of risk to your business and ultimately forcing you to revisit your design.
The number of commas in this sentence is excessive; when the phrase “over time” and the rest of the parenthetical phrase (ending with environment) is transposed, the comma between them becomes extraneous and the sentence structure is clearer: “If thorough controls are not in place, as updates and changes are made to your environment over time, conflicts are likely to arise, posing varying levels of risk to your business and ultimately forcing you to revisit your design.”

From: Daily Writing Tips

Abstruse vs. Obtuse

Some writers seem to be confusing obtuse with the word abstruse, as in these incorrect examples on the web:
Believe it or not, the American public wasn't always in love with Alfred Hitchcock. Because his movies were often too intelligent or obtuse, he had more fans in the film elite than he did in the general public.
Grizz tends to make Shakespeare-esque, outsider-looking-in type observations about the situations at hand, while Dot Com spouts highly intelligent, yet obtuse references that send you (or maybe just me) to Google.
Having finally struggled through Ulysses, and yes it was a struggle, I had no patience at all for FINNEGANS WAKE, which is even more obtuse. Has anyone actually read it? All of it?
I chide Brad DeLong all the time for making excuses for Greenspan’s thick, obtuse, obscurant speech.
In each of these examples, the context calls for a word that means "difficult to understand." That word is abstruse:
The mistake of using abstruse where obtuse is intended seems to be less common, but it happens:
It is really abstruse to find Avatar not grabbing anything from the Oscars. It was altogether a new theme with a lot of innovations
This movie fan seems to be reaching for obtuse, a word that means "lacking in perception, stupid."
Bottom line: Barely comprehensible language is abstruse. Stupid people are obtuse.
Note: Obtuse derives from Latin obtusus, "blunted, dull." An obtuse angle is "blunt," as opposed to being "sharp."

From: Daily Writing Tips