Browsing Archive: July, 2013

Following on

Posted by K. S. Dearsley on Sunday, July 28, 2013, In : Linguistics 
One more piece about apostrophes and then I'm done with it, honest. There's another use for them that I didn't mention last week, and this one's bucking the who-needs-punctuation trend. This is where apostrophes are placed around words or phrases to indicate that they aren't necessarily factual or true e.g. writing that someone was the 'driver' of a car probably means they were sitting on the back seat. This use is so handy, that some people now draw apostrophes on the air when they speak. I ...
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Don't Get Your Apostrophes in a Twist

Posted by K. S. Dearsley on Monday, July 22, 2013, In : Linguistics 
At the risk of being told where to stick my ;!?"s, I'd like to make a case for punctuation, and apostrophes in particular. The whole point of punctuation is to avoid ambiguity. Most apostrophes are used to show a contraction where letters have been left out of a word or two words are joined, or to indicate possession. 'I'd' is a contraction of 'I would'. 
"That's obvious," I hear someone say, but without the apostrophe, it would read 'id', which is a pyschological term referring to the instin...
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Revisiting the Past

Posted by K. S. Dearsley on Sunday, July 14, 2013, In : Inspiration 
If you have time to sit outside and make the most of the summer weather, and you can't find anything you fancy on your bookshelves, try reading some of your old work. Don't fancy that? Why not? If you don't think it's worth a second look, why should any other reader? Okay, so you already know what happens–or at least you think you do. If you haven't looked through a story, poem or whatever for some while, you could be surprised at how differently you remember it. Not only will you be coming...
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Game, Set and Match

Posted by K. S. Dearsley on Saturday, July 6, 2013, In : Competitions 
What do tennis players and writers have in common? Not much, you might think, but having (mis)spent a lot of the past two weeks watching Wimbledon, I've come to the conclusion that writers could learn a lot from them.
When you submit your work to a publication or competition, you can try to do some research about what might succeed, just as a tennis player might try to work out their opponent's strengths and weaknesses by watching their previous matches. Ultimately, however, editors and compe...
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About Me


My writing career began as a freelance feature writer for the local press, businesses and organisations. Now a prize-winning playwright and short story writer, my work has appeared in numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic. I write as K. S. Dearsley because it saves having to keep repeating my forename, and specialise in fantasy and other speculative genres.

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