Articles:
Archaism
Archaisms are out-of-style words or phrases, such as “whilst,” “thusly,” or “thou.” Use of archaisms in your writing creates a stilted, inauthentic voice, tone, persona. Use of archaisms in your writing creates a stilted, inauthentic tone. Learn to identify archaisms in your work and the work of others.
Articles
Choppy Writing
Conjunctions
Coordinating Conjunctions
Coordination & Subordination
What is Coordination & Subordination? Learn how to identify and correctly employ coordinate and subordinate sentence structures. These are the basic building blocks of Standard Written English.
Description
Learn, when composing
so that you can access the readability of your work or the work of others.
Edit for Diction
Being a good editor from the perspective of diction requires declarative knowledge about Archaisms; Bias-Free Language; Cliché; Concrete & Sensory Language; Figurative Language; Homonyms; Jargon; and Vague Language, Generalizations
Diction matters a great deal to writers, speakers, knowledge workers . . . becauses audiences are likely to ignore information and texts if it employs inappropriate diction. Use these strategies to edit your texts for diction.
Flow – How to Create Flow in Writing
Writing teachers, writers, and readers have different definitions for the concept of flow. For writers, flow is a mind set, a sense that you feel creative and articulate. For students and aspiring writers, flow may also refer to stylistic principles related to coherence and unity, For readers and writing teachers, flow refers to a style of writing that is smooth and logical, seamlessly transitioning from one idea to the next in a way that engages the reader and enhances their understanding of the text. This article focuses primarily on this latter conception of flow. By mastering flow, alongside coherence, inclusiveness, simplicity, and unity, you’ll be well-equipped to craft professional or academic pieces that engage and inform effectively.
Hyphens
Independent Clauses, Dependent Clauses & Phrases
Modifiers, Modification
How do dangling, misplaced, limiting, or squinting modifiers cause confusion in sentences? How can I avoid these modification problems?
Overgeneralization
Readers are likely to ignore your prose or dismiss it as an uneducated rant when you make overgeneralizations. Learn how to avoid this error.
Parallelism, Parallel Structure, Parallel Construction
Learn about parallelism as a foundational grammatical structure in English. Learn about parallelism from a rhetorical perspective: use parallel structure to facility brevity, clarity & rhythm.
Parts of a Sentence
Learn about the parts of a sentence in Standard Written English: subjects, verbs, and objects and Independent Clauses, Dependent Clauses & Phrases.
Primer Sentences
Pronoun – Guide to Writing with Pronouns
This Guide to Writing with Pronouns in 2022 provides everything you need to know about pronouns. The Guide defines the different types of pronouns in English, analyzes the function of pronouns in sentences, and explains how to identify and fix pronoun errors. Learn about correct pronoun usage so you can establish a professional tone in your communications and ensure your language is clear, concise, inclusive and gender-sensitive.
Research Question
Revise for Thesis or Research Question
Sentence Patterns
What are the four most common sentence patterns in Standard Written English? How can I identify which sentence patterns to use in my texts?
Sentence Structure – Syntax
Learn to identify 1. Simple, 2. Compound, 3. Complex, and 4. Compound-Complex Sentences. Understand how to use these sentence structure depending on the message and the occasion.
Sentence Types
Learn to identify the 4 sentence types in English: 1. declarative, 2. imperative, 3 interrogative, and 4. exclamatory sentences.
Sentences
Sentences are more than a basic unit of thought: they are a signal of education, self regulation, and professionalism. Sentence errors undermine a professional prose style: Learn to distinguish independent clauses from dependent clauses and phrases. Develop your understanding of the tao of the sentence in order to avoid common errors: modification errors, comma splices, run-on sentences and sentence fragments.
Subject-Verb Agreement
Subjects, Verbs, & Objects
Subordinating Conjunctions
Vague Language
Vague language is abstract, undecipherable, underdeveloped, fragmented prose. Use of vague language can be a form of rhetrickery–an intentional rhetorical move. Yet more commonly vagueness is unintentional, a signal that the writer, speaker, knowledge worker . . . needs to think more deeply about the matter. Learn how to eliminate vague language from your work and the work of others.
Verb-Tense Shift