Paper to digital: a year on (2013)
I’ve just got back from shopping for my son’s mountain of school things for the beginning of term. And one of those […]
20 sentence patterns you can’t ignore
I’ve been working and researching sentences almost daily, now, for over a year. Yes I’m a word-nerd, but there you […]
Extraposition and inversion: glam-sounding simple things
Sentence patterns are very predictable in English, and, whether you’re a native-speaker or not, it’s easy to get into a […]
How to move from one sentence to the next, naturally
The key to moving naturally from one sentence to the next — which is, of course, the whole point of […]
There, there: a no-brainer for emphasis in a sentence
This approach to adding emphasis or drawing attention to one part of a sentence is rather grandly called ‘existential there’ […]
Make words work
Placing emphasis on the right idea and right word in a sentence is an art. In the UK this isn’t […]
How tiny words can change your writing
One tiny little word can make such a difference to the meaning, the deeper meaning, of a sentence. Take a […]
All power to ‘to be’: cleft sentences
Writing teachers can be super mean about ‘to be’. It’s a boring, unemotive, indescriptive verb, a total waste of space, […]
Kelly Rowland’s (tentatively-linked) advice for emphatic writing
Kelly Rowland said in an interview on BBC Radio 1 recently that she loves being in England because everyone sings […]
The World of Ghostwriting
Ghostwriters are the illicit side of writing. Prostitutes of the written word, if you will. Authors don’t like to admit […]