Slang and Colloquialisms

I know only two words of American slang, ‘swell’ and ‘lousy’ I think ‘swell’ is lousy, but ‘lousy’ is swell. ~ J.B. Priestley What do you think “far out” might mean to someone trying to learn English? Would they relate it to distance? Could they ever understand that it meant “rad”? Oh, sorry. We meant

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So You Want to Write a Book

For millennia, communicating knowledge in written form has gone through huge changes in technology. First, there were pictures on cave walls (think Lascaux, Native American pictographs). When the alphabet was created, people carved their messages on stone tablets (think Ten Commandments or the Rosetta Stone), or pressed symbols into damp clay (eg, the Sumerians). Share

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Front-Matter and Back-Matter

For those of you who are new to book writing, this is an important question. Here are some basics. Most books may be viewed as having three major internal components (i.e., not counting the front and back covers): the front-matter, the body, and the back-matter. The body is the content of your book. It’s what

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Linking Clauses with Conjunctive Adverbs

A word that connects one phrase or clause to another is called a conjunction (literally join). Common examples are and & or. When an adverb is used this way, it’s called a conjunctive adverb. Conjunctive adverbs, which we’ll call simply “clause links”, may show, for example, cause and effect, sequence, contrast, or comparison. Here’s a

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Writers Need Editors Because …

Here at AES, we read a lot of published books (both printed and electronic). And we find lots of errors. This is especially true for self-published works. The question is why? Here are some thoughts. First, the writer introduced the errors—that’s likely because the writer was more interested in telling the story (fiction or non-fiction).

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Misused Conjunction

A very common mistake, which has been around for a long time, is the word that should follow the verb try. Example of incorrect usage: One should try and write better. The word try requires a preposition, not a conjunction. (A conjunction literally joins two equivalent or related words, phrases, clauses, or sentences.) The sentence

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