December 8, 2010 by Fiction Editor Beth Hill last modified April 18, 2016 Dialogue has its own rules for punctuation. Commas go in particular places, as do terminal marks such as periods and question marks. Only what is spoken is within the quotation marks. Other parts of the same sentence—dialogue tags and action or thought—go outside […]
Punctuation in Dialogue Read More »
Alice E. M. Underwood Parallel sentence elements in grammar are just like parallel lines in geometry: they face the same direction and never meet. More precisely, in grammar, it’s less about meeting and more about balance. Parallelism in grammar is defined as two or more phrases or clauses in a sentence that have the same grammatical structure.
What Is the Singular They? They is a third-person pronoun, usually referring to a group of something. It is possible, however, to use they in reference to a single something (the same is true for the possessive, objective, and reflexive forms of they: their, them, and themselves). This is sometimes called the singular they. A teacher can make a big difference in
The passive voice is often maligned by grammazons as a bad writing habit. Or, to put it in the active voice, grammazons across the English-speaking world malign the passive voice as a bad writing habit. In general, the active voice makes your writing stronger, more direct, and, you guessed it, more active. The subject is something, or it does the action