Showing Tag: "contractions" (Show all posts)

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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Oh, No It Isn't!

Posted by K. S. Dearsley on Monday, March 18, 2013, In : Linguistics 
Do you grind your teeth when you hear someone say they were 'sat' or they were 'stood' somewhere? Me too! I always want to ask who sat or stood them there, or did they really mean they were sitting or standing? The increasing tendency to use a passive instead of the past imperfect or a gerund is the result of dialect creep. I have no objection to dialects being used instead of standard English when appropriate, but this construction is not only replacing standard English, it's taking over oth...
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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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