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Correction vs Incorrection

Trust your instinct as least as much as you trust your editor.

I’m not going to link to the blog post where I found this, because it’s not my goal here to embarrass or shame anyone, or to set myself up as a better source than another blog. I only want to point out that a

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Four Sentences

“There was a man” is a profoundly different sentence than “There was an old man,” which is profoundly different than “There was, back when we lived in the blue house, a man down the street from us, down toward Graves Avenue.” And that last one is different than “There was in those days an elder

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“Active” vs “Passive” Round N, or “Once more into the breach, my friends!”

You have no idea how annoying this is to me!

Or at least I assume none of my three regular readers have figured out, over the years, how annoying it is to me that so many people rant and rail against something that they call “passive voice,” or “passive tense,” or “passive verbs,” all the while

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Another Jab at the Passive Phantom

There’s at least one thing more amusing than people ranting and railing against passive voice:

…the fact that they can’t even identify it.

[P]eople disagree with me when I point out such things (over and over again, like a CD that has gotten stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuck), and ask rhetorically where on

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Bad Advice, Part II – The Banned Tools

Advice on painting:

Eliminate all unneeded colors.

Eliminate all unneeded brush strokes.

Every brush stroke should do one of two things: tell the story or build the subject’s face.

Never use red.

Whenever you want to add a color, ask yourself “Does this color add anything to the face?” If not, eliminate it.

Ok, I made all that up. But I’m

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Active Voice, Passive Voice, and the Dread Disease of Adverbitis

Wandering slowly and aimlessly through the thickly growing vines of the cyber jungle, I happened quite unexpectedly upon yet another rant about the use of adverbs, this one (quite illogically) perpetuating the common and poorly-thought-out adage that using adverbs equals using passive voice.

 

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