Showing Tag: "grammar" (Show all posts)

Syntaxing the Brain

Posted by K. S. Dearsley on Wednesday, May 22, 2024,

Would you expect to become a top concert pianist if you never practised your scales? If you didn't practise your serve, would you expect to win Wimbledon? The building blocks underpinning any skill might be difficult and repetitive to learn, but they are essential if you want to be the best. Initially, it can seem that they are holding you back, and stifling your creativity and flair, but if you practise enough, the basics become second-nature, and you get them right without even having to th...
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Living Language

Posted by K. S. Dearsley on Monday, February 26, 2018, In : Linguistics

A few days ago, I finished reading a book called Mother Tongue: The English Language by Bill Bryson. A linguistics study of the English language and the foreign, social and cultural influences on it might not sound much of a page-turner, but I found it fascinating.
There are many facts in it with which to dumbfound your friends at parties, such as how many different ways William Shakespeare spelled his name, but to my mind, what is most interesting is how English has always evolved and ada...
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Grammar Problems? The Answer's Simple

Posted by K. S. Dearsley on Thursday, July 14, 2016,

'No man or woman have' or 'no man or woman has'? The first didn't sound right to me, but you know how it is, once you question something, you're no longer sure of the answer. I had to look it up to be certain.
If I hadn't had access to a copy of The Oxford Manual of Style, what could I have done to avoid making an embarrassing mistake? There are numerous grammar and spelling websites, of course, but you need to be careful that you use the right country's English e.g. not US English when yo...
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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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In Other Words

Posted by K. S. Dearsley on Sunday, April 14, 2013, In : Linguistics

I intended this blog to be about cohesion and coherence, but what I wrote didn't have much of either. Then I tried to make it about writing about subjects that don't interest you (again) and, frankly, it was boring. While searching for a solution, I found myself doing the linguistic equivalent of doodling, and coming up with alternative definitions for linguistic terms. 'Oxymoron' could be 'stupid air', if that wouldn't be a contradiction in terms. 'Tautology' might be what a science teacher ...
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About Me

K S Dearsley

Northampton, England

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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