Miscellaneous tips and topics
From Rick:
For this week’s post we have something a bit different. Lately I’ve run across a bunch of useful tidbits that I wanted to pass along because each is too short to warrant a separate blog.
(1) THREE ARTICLES ON PROMOTING, SELLING, PRICING YOUR BOOKS–
How Much Should I Charge For My E-book?
(2) TWO GREAT BLOGS TO SUBSCRIBE TO–
Daily Writing Tips (Or sign up to get these by daily emails)
(3) A refresher WARNING against using song lyrics in your writing:
Read this article before you even consider using song lyrics in your novel.
(4) A COUPLE OF OFTEN MISUSED EXPRESSIONS–
AGGRAVATE: (He really aggravates me.) This is an incorrect word usage. “Aggravate” means “to make worse,” many people use this word to mean “irritate” or ‘annoy.” (He scraped his knuckles on the rock wall and aggravated the injury each time he put his hand into his jeans pocket. I should point out that this misusage is a longstanding one. As with all dialog, you can certainly misuse it in dialog. Just be sure your character wouldn’t know the difference. I’m currently reading To Kill a Mockingbird (published in 1960) and I saw it misused there. It wasn’t in dialog, but it was in the narrator’s (Scout’s) voice.
Wool irritates her skin, and she aggravates the irritation by scratching it.
His squeaky voice is annoying enough, but his stutter aggravates it causes people to tune him out..
TRY TO: “I’ll try and get it done as soon as possible.” How often do we hear someone say something like this? The expression is “to try to (do something).” Remember that “and” is a conjunction and generally signifies “in addition to” or “also.” By using ‘and” after “try” we’re really expressing TWO different actions, not one. “Try TO” means “to attempt” or “to make an effort.” The expressions are NOT interchangeable. There’s a rather big difference between “try to fail” and “try and fail.”
He tried and failed the class. (He really tried, but couldn’t do it.)
He tried to fail the class. (He didn’t want to pass in the first place.)
I’ll try and make the team. (I’ll try and I know I’ll succeed.)
I’ll try to make the team. (I’ll give it my best, but no guarantees.)
(5) 10 ANNOYING WORD FEATURES AND HOW TO TURN THEM OFF–
I coved many of these in my posts on formatting, but there are a couple of others in here.
How To Disable MS Word Annoyances
(6) SOME USEFUL INTERJECTIONS AND HOW TO SPELL THEM PROPERLY–
100 Mostly Small But Expressive Interjections
–Rick