G is for Ghosts and Gradatio

Posted on April 7, 2012 by happyeditor

Tales of ghoulies and ghosties abound in every country throughout the world and now ghosts are tipped to be the next thing on the publishing wish list.

Dust off a historic ghost or two and rewrite them into a fictional tale as Elysabeth Eldering did with Bride-and-Seek, breathing life into the nineteenth century legend from Covington Manor.

Or choose a modern slant. Drs. Dave and Sharon Oester at Ghost Web have collected scary stories from many members of their International Ghost Hunters’ Society and have published them in a free pdf e-book. Find the offer about half way down their home page.

May be good for inspiration.

From MuseItUp Publishing blog, here are two story-based entries

Of Churches, Ghoulies, Ghosties and Things

Ghosts in the Kitchen. Ghosts in the Attic

Gradatio

One of my favourite ways of building a climax through patterning where the last word or words in the first clause are repeated to start the following clause and this repetitive pattern continues through three or more clauses.

From the Sentence Openers blog, How to Write a Sentence or Sentences that Hook. I have chosen Rosalind’s words in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

“For your brother and my sister no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they ask one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have theymade a pair of stairs to marriage.”

I’ll try one tomorrow–too tired tonight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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F is for Fun, Fonts and Figures of Speech

Posted on April 6, 2012 by happyeditor

Day Six of the A – Z Challenge

Fun

…and there’s never enough of it. Here’s something you can easily use yourself on your blog or website to create an interactive space for visitor comment or daily writing.

This is Wall Wisher–still in beta–but it has proved very easy to use.  Click on the sticky to see my how-to  Slow and Steady Writers  post when I embedded in Blogger. Double click on the board to add a new sticky–you don’t need to sign in, but I have asked to moderate posts before they go live in case of spam. Use the pink tabs to access the big screen.

Two things I forgot to say in my original post if you are building your own wall:

  • After you choose title and subtitle, you need to choose or upload an image for your wall.

  • It does not seem to like short links when it comes to linking. Use the original URL of the link.

    Fonts

Fonts come in different sizes depending on the typeface you use and the point size you choose. Always use the suggestion made in your chosen publisher’s guidelines.

This is Arial 12 pt

This is Times New Roman 12 pt

This is Courier New 12 pt

This is Calibri 12 pt

Print books normally use 11 or 12pt but web print looks better at 14 pt.

And my fonts are behaving fractiously today. Shall publish anyway and fiddle with them later lol.

Figures of Speech

What use are they?

  • Do you think figures of speech are useful to browse through to find ideas for varying your writing style or sentence construction?

    Do you use loads of figures of speech naturally and have no interest in what they are called.

    Let me know on the wall or in the comments below.

A blessed Good Friday to all this Easter.

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E is for Editor and Enallage

Posted on April 6, 2012 by happyeditor

Day Five A-Z Challenge

Kate McInnes’s Office

Kate McInnes's Officefrom Envato’s photostream on Flickr

Today’s post is late. late, late. A busy editing day, a social evening and then hours spent looking for a suitable image instead of taking a quick photo of my own desk which is nowhere nearly as tidy as the one above.

I have a tower for the desktop, a second keyboard, a  back-up external drive, a USB hub,  a second mouse and innumerable sheets of paper to the left of my laptop. On the right there is the desk light, a chinese vase filled with pens and pencils, a paperweight, a hole punch, a keyboard hoover, an inbox of to do notes and CDs of software and back-up photo files, a flash drive–what’s that doing there?–a set of file cards, a journalist’s notebook, an A4 folder, post-its,  loose biros and more paper.

At my feet, I have my reference books, dictionaries, language dictionaries (authors often use foreign language dialogue or quotations which must be checked), thesaurus and  Chicago Manual of Style.

If you want to more about editors and what they do, please read

Tips on Editing: Part 1

What is Editing?

By Nancy Carty Lepri

which you will find at Writers on the Move where I guest post on the 24th of each month (hint hint).

I love editing, discussing plots (and sometimes plot holes lol) and ironing out the grammar that sometimes makes sentences so difficult to read. And for that reason, I am pretty cross about the next figure of speech.

Figure of Speech: Enallage

I cannot believe that we have a figure of speech to accredit grammatical mistakes. Every day we hear grammatical errors in  dialogue . Some we find funny and repeat and perpetuate them– a favorite child talking about foots or mouses is endearing.

But using a singular verb after a plural subject: we was eating our tea when the taxi arrived–may make for  picturesque and authentic dialect but does it deserve to be ennobled by calling it a figure of speech?

Some definitions claim that enallage is when an author changes one form  (e.g. singular)  for another (e.g. plural) intentionally for dramatic effect.

Here’s one editor who claims that the mistake is more likely to be a typo  or grammatical lapse than a deliberate example of a figure of speech :-) What do you think?

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D is for Dance, Dystopia and Dystmesis

Posted on April 4, 2012 by happyeditor

Day Four of the A to Z Challenge

Why dance?

Dance is the earliest form of creative expression, and the perfect counterbalance to depression and the difficult aches and pains suffered by writers, editors and other deskbound professions. It is for me one of the best treats when I allow myself an “artists’s date” as prescribed by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way.

It’s also gives me a great chance to share this video of 93-year-old Mathilda Klein dancing the quickstep, high heels and all. Inspirational.

The Dystopian Novel

Dystopia was a word coined by philosopher John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century when he accused the British government of the day of being dystopian with reference to one of their policies on Ireland. “…Utopian,” he said, “is something too good to be practicable but what they…favour is too bad to be practicable.”

Animal Farm  and 1984 are examples of dystopian novels, set in a harsh, repressive society. The Hunger Games is typical of the modern dystopian trend in YA fiction

No place for the Mathildas of this world in Dystopia.

Figures of Speech

Dystmesis is when we separate the syllables of a word by inserting another word in between them. There’s only one way for me to describe Mathilda–abso-jolly-lutely fabulous. Dystmesis in action. lol

I’d love to read your opinions of dancing through life, the trend for dystopian novels and/or your favourite examples of dystmesis. Please keep visiting and commenting. It’s such a delightful way to get to know other writers through the A to Z challenge.

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C is for Copyright and Chiasmus

Posted on April 3, 2012 by happyeditor

Day Three of the A to Z Blogging Challenge
Greeting Card

C is for card and the earliest greeting cards were often elaborately sewn and decorated. This New Year card is reproduced from the collection of photographs uploaded by the Center for Jewish History and shared on Flickr through a Creative Commons license. There are no known copyright restrictions though the Center for Jewish History has a page of copyright information and a rights statement which just proves how tricky the whole copyright issue is.

Authors of blogs and educational materials may argue “fair usage” for short quotations from public or previously published work. But as soon as you write commercial fiction or charge for your work, you must be very careful indeed about respecting the copyright of others.

Researching illustrations for B is for Bestiary, I was amazed to find that although the manuscripts are hundreds of years old, most of the illustrations have been placed under copyright restrictions by the photographer or museum or owner of the original work. So much for feeling safe if the original artist or writer is long dead.

So I would like to call for three cheers for every creative artist who offers to share work under a Creative Commons licence and for every collector, museum and body who also share their collections freely in that way through Flickr.

More Figures of Speech

And back to the figures of speech. So many of these begin with C. Wikipedia lists cacophony, cataphora, classification. climax, commoratio and consonance as well as my choice for today chiasmus.

The word chiasmus comes from the Greek letter chi  or x. The Greeks loved using this particular criss-cross construction in their rhetoric and writing.  But it was in use long before them and Barack Obama still uses  it most effectively in speeches today.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair” is a famous quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

And Samuel Johnson is quoted as saying: ” Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

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B is for Bestiaries and Bathos

Posted on April 2, 2012 by happyeditor

illustrated manuscript page from bestiary, Royal Library, Denmark

Bestiaries were illustrated manuscripts portraying real and mythical animals with stories relating to each. They were very popular in the Middle Ages but hardly scientific. Instead, they entertained with fables and spiritual content as the stories were often allegorical.

The illustration above comes courtesy of the Royal Library, Denmark and features a page from a later Latin manuscript. It is easy to find wonderful illustrations from and features on bestiaries but difficult to reproduce anything because of copyright restrictions.

The Royal Library, Denmark very generously allows use and reproductions of texts and pictured from their site under Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND.  Find further information on this manuscript at The Medieval Bestiary .  Just looking at the home page of the Medieval Bestiary is temptation enough to browse. Plenty of food for a writer’s imagination here  ranging from horror to fantasy.

And back to the figures of speech. From the sublime to the prosaic,  B is for Bathos. Bathos is exactly that–when a highly hyped emotional moment is brought down to earth by a prosaic comment. It is a highly prized technique in comedy.

English poet Alexander Pope introduced the term in the 18th century and used it to great effect in his mock-heroic poem Rape of The Lock.

If you have the time to check out some comedy examples, take a look at Duncan McKenzie’s Writing Tips. I find Bathos funny. Hope you do too.


 

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A is for Antiphonary and Anaphora

Posted on April 1, 2012 by happyeditor

 

Antiphonary, f.92v, (213 x 146 mm), 15th century, Alexander Turnbull Library, MSR-03.

A is for antiphonary  An antiphonary is a book containing a collection of psalms, anthems or musical responses to be sung or returned at religious services.  This one, shared under a Creative Commons licence was uploaded to Flickr from the National Library of New Zealand. It was a new word for me and I couldn’t resist it or the photograph.

But as this is an editing blog, the a-z posts for the month are on figures of speech, the tricks writers use to make their work outstanding. And A is the start letter for ninteen figures of speech collected in the list on Wikipedia.

Some are well-known.

  • Alliteration is where words start with the same consonant–the sleepy snake slithered slowly seawards. This was the device which pre-dated rhyme in early English poetry. Good with snakes to have the sss hissing along the line lol.
  • Anaphora is the term used when the same word or phrase starts (usually three) successive clauses.  In his great oration now known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King started eight successive clauses with these words, building up to a strong never-to-b-forgotten emotional climax.

But who knows off hand what anacoluthon means? Or aposeopesis? 

Share your thoughts on favorite figures of speech starting with A by using the comments box below. Or even just your thoughts on figures of speech. Do their names matter?

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A to Z Blogging Challenge

Posted on March 26, 2012 by happyeditor

"old book for atozblogging challenge"I am new to blogging challenges. But I had such an interesting time on the MotherReader challenge at the beginning of the year when I met so many  writers and visited such informative sites that I decided to use this blog for the A to Z April Blogging Challenge.

This is one of the biggest challenges in the blogging calendar. I am sign up number 1193 which gives some idea of the number of participants and there is still almost a week to go until the challenge starts.

As April  1 is a Sunday this year, the first post on a topic beginning with A will be on the Sunday but after that Sundays are days of rest. Otherwise posts are made daily, each day on a topic beginning with the next letter of the alphabet–B, C, D and so on.

Bloggers try to visit five new blogs a day, starting with the chalenger directly below them on the list. And I’m so looking forward to meeting many new cyberfriends and learning about their interests. Please join me.

Blogging Challenges

The good points:

  • an ideal way to meet new readers
  • an ideal way to publicize your own blog
  • an ideal way to build up a consistent daily writing habit
  • an ideal way to find new ideas to read and write about
  • an ideal way to source articles for your own e-book

The bad points

  • an ideal way to spend lots of time you don’t really have surfing the web
  • an ideal way to over-expose your blog by posting every day.  Received wisdom says once or twice a week at most is enough lol
  • an ideal way to lose readers if you accept the wrong challenge and promote blogs you don’t believe in.
  • an ideal way to lose sight of your own purpose in posting.

A to Z topics

As this is an editing blog, my topics will all be related to editing and figures of speech, not because I want to show off how many odd and complicated words I know to categorize relatively simple writing devices –0kay, yes, I love showing off–but because a knowledge of writing styles is an indispensable part of the writer’s portfolio.

You may never need to know what an oxymoron is but you may be enchanted by the writing trick of juxtaposing opposites for effect–one of the most famous in this category being bitter sweet.

Some challengers have been planning their posts since the start of the year. Some of us are whisking in now at the last moment. Whether we succeed or fail is unimportant–what is important is the joy of trying to do this and meeting new cyber-friends on the way.

Today’s new WordPress Achievement:

I have at last managed to insert a banner picture in my sidebar. I did not find this as easy to do as in Blogger but once it dawned on me to add a text box widget and paste the code in that, all was plain sailing.

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Grammar Goofs To Avoid

Posted on March 12, 2012 by happyeditor

One of the many infographics from Copyblogger is
a memorable way to remember the fifteen things that are anathema to editors.

(What! Only fifteen? LOL)
And much to my joy–the dangling participles are hanging at the end.
Not the best explanation I’ve ever seen. (My own superb article is on editing participles is also posted today.) But you get the picture…

15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly

What do you think about infographics? A better way to remember? How many do you recognize? How many do you have problems with?

I tried linking it in but it did rather clash with my new Word Press header.

This is my first attempt at customizing my WordPress header simply using the free Paint program and my own photos. Comments (nice ones) welcome. Other comments would also be helpful. I won’t pretend to like them lol.

 

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Editing Participles

Posted on March 12, 2012 by happyeditor

The great orators of the Roman Empire polished their sentences until they fitted together seamlessly and shone with brilliant phrasing and emotional rhetoric. One of their favorite tricks was the use of the ablative absolute.  This was a crisp independent phrase, often summarizing an action which preceded that of the main clause. The important thing to remember is that the ablative absolute using a noun and participle  never could be the subject of the main clause.

Cicero being the consul, the army marched out of the city.

Nowadays we would translate it as a time clause–when Cicero was consul–but the Romans used present and past participles and a particular set of word endings to create the same meaning.

When the great dictionary makers of the eighteenth century started laying down the rules of English grammar, they based them on the Latin formats they knew so well. And participle usage has proved problematic ever since.

What is a participle?

A participle iis formed from a verb. It needs an auxiliary verb to carry it if it is to act as a verb e.g. The train is waiting at the platform. A present participle ends in -ing. In this sentence, it is completed by the verb to be.

But it can also be a noun: Waiting for late buses annoys me. Or an adjective: I sat in the waiting room. Or waiting at the bus stop, I wished I had remembered my umbrella. In the last sentence, the word waiting tells us more about the I of the sentence. So it is effectively an adjective modifying the word I.

Dangling participles.

I’m going to blame the Romans and their ablative absolutes for these. You see them here, you see them there, I see them round me everywhere. They are so common that readers and writers are beginning to argue that they are acceptable. Very few editors would agree with that and don’t ever try arguing the point with me LOL.

Sailing into harbor, the cathedral towered above us.

Yep the participle is the -ing word sailing.  It is not a noun as it is when you write: Sailing is my favorite pastime. It is an adjective. The context clearly shows that we are sailing. The sentence just as clearly states that the cathedral, the nearest noun, must be the thing sailing into harbor.

Present participles, the -ing words used as adjectives, will attach themselves to the nearest noun. Used carelessly they can ruin your big emotional scene with no trouble at all.

Taking a step toward her, the dark oak wardrobe caught his eye.

Yep, a walking wardrobe–certainly eye-catching, especially to a cranky editor.

Can you add more from your reading? Every time you find one, please come back and add it here in the comments. I find them daily and shall add a few below from this week’s reading. That’s how confident I am that they will be lurking round every book I see in the next few days.

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