LumpysCorner

I wish that I could state the rule that one must never ever use an apostrophe to form a plural. All I can say is that one must almost never ever do so.

Stop making failure a negative thing and start writing. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and start creating. And if you do mess up, do your best to learn from it. Trust me, you’ll be much better off.

The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), continued to work day jobs throughout his life.

Other authors who held down day jobs throughout their writing careers include Bram Stoker, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, among many others.

she wrote the bestselling book Interview With The Vampire while working her day job as an insurance claims examiner.

While visualizing your story may seem like the right way to approach writing, it turns out that for full-time writers, the brain performs a bit differently. When Dr. Lotze watched writers from a competitive creative writing program perform the same tests, he found that experienced writers, while brainstorming, used parts of their brains associated with speech instead of vision.

Novice writers, Lotze suggests, are more likely to watch the story unfold like a movie inside their heads.

The conjunction while, for example, tends to pop up in contexts in which a different conjunction may be the better choice.

temporal conjunction

to introduce clauses that express opposition

cynic comes from a Greek word meaning “dog-like, currish, churlish.”

The word cynosure comes from a Greek word meaning “dog’s tail.” This was the name given by the Greeks to the northern constellation Ursa Minor, the “Small Bear” in whose tail is the Pole-star, also known as the North Star. Because the North Star is bright and a means of finding the direction of north, the word cynosure acquired the figurative meaning of “something that is bright and serves as a guide.”

“English words don’t end in u,”

The only two native English words that end in u are the pronouns thou and you, but they probably shouldn’t count because they really end in ou.

There remain 50 or so “English” words that do end in u. I put English in quotation marks because most of these u-words obviously came undigested from some other language, most from French.

What exactly do freelance copywriters write? Everything! From ad copy to newsletters, from policies to blogs, from business proposals to brochures, and from catalog blurbs to t-shirt taglines, there's nothing off-limits. James told me she's worked on everything from tweets for non-profits to ghost writing a book for a motivational speaker to writing taglines for Nike. So, if you are after variety, it appears that the freelance thing delivers. Sure, some freelances have specialties, but generally speaking, they are just really skilled at writing and they help businesses who need someone with that skill to produce written content. Unlike traditional writers, these people don't get their names in the byline, but they do get paid hourly for their work. Did you catch that? HOUR-LY.

It’s a trash can. Not a physical one, but a mental trash can. It’s for discarding advice that doesn’t feel right for you. It doesn’t seem like the right answer. Your gut tells you this advice isn’t for you. It just doesn’t resonate. If that happens, you should ignore that tip and move on. My teacher would say, “Use what feels right and discard the rest.” I think a lot of writers forget to take out their trash can when they’re learning about writing. But it really pays to keep it handy.