Tag: grammar

By Leah Wohl-Pollack, Lead Editor This is part two of our series on common grammar mistakes you might not know you’re making. Check out part 1, which covers misplaced modifiers and dangling participles, here. In this post, we’ll cover two more grammar mistakes indie writers often make: passive voice and run-on sentences. By the end of this post, I hope you feel a little more confident about editing your writing for grammar.

1. Passive voice

You may or may not remember from English class that all verbs are either active or passive in voice. In sentences with active verbs, the subject takes responsibility for the action. With passive voice, the action is not attributed to a subject at all. Despite what you might have heard, passive voice isn’t inherently bad; in fact, it makes frequent appearances in political and legal writing, and with good reason. It can be useful for a writer who wants to avoid attributing responsibility to a particular person or group:

The president was advised not to sign the bill.

In this example, the writer may not want to list out who advised the president, so the passive form is appropriate. Passive voice is also useful when the “do-er” of the sentence isn’t necessarily important:

The constellation can be observed from September to February.

Since anyone with the ability to see and a view of the night sky can observe the constellation, using the passive form of the verb is fine to keep the subject open.

But when you’re writing fiction, you’ll probably want to avoid the passive voice (except in a few special cases). In order to drive the narrative forward on a sentence-by-sentence basis, you must allow—nay, encourage!—your subjects to own their actions. Here’s an example of passive voice that I might come across when editing fiction:

Mike’s breath was held as Lynn peered over the edge of the cliff.

It’s almost definitely important to the narrative that Mike is nervous about Lynn’s safety, and describing Mike holding his breath is a good storytelling choice when you consider the concept of show vs. tell. But the passive form of the verb (was held) is clunking everything up. This use of the passive voice attributes the action to no subject at all, even though the subject here is essential to the story. To rephrase the sentence with active voice, we simply need to attribute the action (held) to the correct subject (Mike):

Mike held his breath as Lynn peered over the edge of the cliff.

What a difference! This switch to active voice keeps the sentence flowing smoothly, and the reader stays immersed in the scene. It also helps show what Mike is feeling without telling the reader outright.

2. Run-on sentences

Generally speaking, a sentence (also known as an independent clause) is made up of a subject and a verb. A compound sentence contains two or more independent clauses tied together with either a conjunction or a punctuation mark. Sometimes, you might find yourself tying together multiple independent clauses—but you’ve neglected to include the appropriate conjunction(s) or punctuation. Enter the dreaded run-on sentence. As a book editor, I come across these puppies here and there. But how are you supposed to recognize a run-on sentence when you’re self-editing your novel? Here’s an example of a run-on sentence:

I love to go to the coffee shop next door to work on my writing it is always easy to concentrate there.

This sentence contains two independent clauses that haven’t been properly tied together; in other words, it’s missing a conjunction and/or punctuation mark. If you’re not immediately sure whether a sentence you’ve written is a run-on, or you know it’s a run-on but can’t tell where the missing conjunction or punctuation mark should go, you can try the question trick. This is a simple method that involves turning your sentence into a yes-or-no question. If the whole sentence can be easily rephrased into a single question, it’s not a run-on. If it needs to be turned into two questions, then you know it’s a run-on and you know where to put the missing conjunction or punctuation! Let me show you how it’s done. Using the example above, we find the first part of the sentence is easily turned into a single yes-or-no question:

Do I love to go to the coffee shop next door to work on my writing?

But if we try to turn the entire sentence into a single question, it doesn’t fly:

Do I love to go to the coffee shop next door to work on my writing it is always easy to concentrate there?

To make it work, we would need two separate questions:

Do I love to go to the coffee shop next door to work on my writing? Is it always easy to concentrate there?

This trick has shown us we definitely have a run-on sentence on our hands. On top of that, we also know exactly where in the sentence to insert the missing piece: between the words writing and it is. In this case, we could solve the problem in two ways: either using a punctuation mark on its own, or a conjunction with a punctuation mark. Using a punctuation mark:

I love to go to the coffee shop next door to work on my writing; it is always easy to concentrate there.

Note that not just any punctuation mark will work. In this example, inserting a comma instead of a semicolon would create another problem: a comma splice. But if you despise semicolons or would just rather use a comma, be sure to pair it with the appropriate conjunction.

Using a conjunction with a punctuation mark:

I love to go to the coffee shop next door to work on my writing, because it is always easy to concentrate there.

That wraps up part 2 of our series on grammar mistakes you might not know you’re making. With these two posts, I hope to prepare you to tackle your self-editing head-on. At the same time, we all know catching every one of your own grammar errors is darn near impossible. That’s why, after you’ve done your part, you can send your manuscript to Invisible Ink, where we’ll fix your errors and keep your voice.

Tags editing, grammar, passive voice, proofreading, run-on sentences

Writing Advice

You might not know you’re making these grammar mistakes Part 1: Misplaced modifiers and dangling participles

Blue sky with a red and white yield sign and blog title

By Leah Wohl-Pollack, Lead Editor This may come as a shock, considering I’ve been known to fall asleep cradling my Chicago Manual of Style, but I don’t believe proper grammar is the be-all and end-all when it comes to good creative writing. Like to split infinitives? No problem. Want to end a sentence in a preposition? Be my guest. But when you’re an indie author writing a novel, there are a few style and grammar rules you should always pay attention to. (See what I did there?) In this post, I’ll give you a rundown of two common grammar mistakes—misplaced modifiers and dangling participles—and some tools you can use to eliminate them from your writing.

1. Misplaced modifiers

Misplaced modifiers are among my favorite grammar mistakes, mostly for their unintended humor. Modifiers come in several forms: words, phrases, and clauses. Because they warrant their own discussion, we’ll cover modifying phrases/clauses in the next section on dangling participles. Right now, let’s look at the issue of misplaced adjectives and adverbs. As you may know, a modifier is a word or phrase that describes a noun within the same sentence. It usually describes the noun it is closest to, which is why misplacing one can cause undesired absurdity or confusion. Here’s an example of a sentence with a misplaced adjective:

The flimsy man’s kite ripped when it got caught in a tree.

Spoken aloud, the meaning may or may not be clear, but written down, there’s an obvious problem. The adjective flimsy is meant to describe the noun kite, but in its current placement, it’s modifying the noun man. Placing the modifier correctly would look like this:

The man’s flimsy kite ripped when it got caught in a tree.

Easy enough. But what about when a misplaced modifier is an adverb rather than an adjective? For example:

They considered whether to play the game Sarah had brought thoughtfully.

While Sarah may have consciously brought a particular game to the party, to say she had brought it thoughtfully doesn’t make a lot of sense. Instead, the modifying adverb thoughtfully should be moved to sit in front of the verb it is intended to modify.

They thoughtfully considered whether to play the game Sarah had brought.

A misplaced adverb can also cause something called a squinting modifier—a modifier that could potentially look toward (hence the word “squinting”) either the noun before or after it. Take a look at the example below, as squinting modifiers can be tricky to spot.

Runners who practice often can go longer distances before getting tired.

The squinting modifier in this sentence allows for two potential interpretations:

Runners practice often so they can go longer distances. Runners can often go longer distances as a result of practicing.

How you fix this sentence will depend on your intended meaning. If it’s the first meaning you’re going for, you could try rephrasing the sentence without an adverb to avoid further confusion:

Regular practice helps runners go longer distances before getting tired.

If it’s the second meaning, you could try a more descriptive adverb:

Runners who practice can usually run longer distances before getting tired.

2. Dangling participles

As I mentioned earlier, dangling participles are a particular kind of misplaced modifier, and an incredibly common one at that—I find at least one in every novel I edit. In order to understand how not to dangle participles, let’s start with a quick refresher on what they are. To form a participle, take any verb (let’s go with sleep) and add an -ing ending. Then you have the present participle of the verb (sleeping). To use the present participle as a modifier, you could write:

Don’t wake the sleeping cat.

The participle sleeping acts as a modifier for the noun cat.

Still with me? Good. Let’s move on to participial phrases. A participial phrase contains a participle and modifies the subject of a sentence. It’s just like the sleeping cat, but it has two clauses instead of one. Here’s an example of a participial phrase used correctly:

Smiling at everyone she passed, Stacy walked to the restaurant.

Participial phrase (modifier): Smiling at everyone she passed Subject of the sentence (noun): Stacy A dangling participle typically occurs at the beginning of a sentence, like with the previous example, but unlike the misplaced modifiers we covered in section one, you can’t fix a dangling participle just by moving it to a different spot in the sentence. The reason is that a dangling participle ties the modifier to the wrong subject, usually because the subject is either missing or in the wrong place. Here’s an example of a sentence with a dangling participle at the beginning—a popular construction:

Watching the clock, the minutes drag by.

So the participial phrase occurs right at the beginning of the sentence; that’s fine. The problem occurs in the second clause, where we seem to have a missing persons case on our hands. Here, the minutes take the subject’s place. In other words, the minutes are watching the clock. How do you fix this? Well, somebody must be watching the clock, and it’s certainly not the minutes. Insert the correct subject, and you’ve got a complete sentence again:

Watching the clock, Stacy felt the minutes drag by.

This solution works, although it requires an extra verb that also happens to be a filter word (feel). Not the best choice stylistically.

Another solution would be to rephrase the sentence so the subject comes first:

Stacy watched the clock, feeling the minutes drag by.

That works—but that extra filter word feel is still sneaking in. To get rid of it, we could try rephrasing another way:

Stacy watched the clock as the minutes dragged by. -or- The minutes dragged by as Stacy watched the clock.

The last option is my favorite for its slightly stronger voice, but there’s nothing wrong with the other options if they suit your style. Hopefully this post has given you some insight into two common grammar rules worth paying attention to as you’re writing and editing your novel. Don’t be discouraged if you find you struggle with these mistakes—many writers do! Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out for the second part of this series—we’ll tackle passive voice and run-ons, two more of the most common grammar mistakes in creative writing.

Tags editing, grammar, modifiers, proofreading

Writing Advice

Comments on commas and conjunctions

Post author By Liam Carnahan
Post date November 22, 2013

Here’s the thing about being a professional editor: You learn, over time, there are mistakes people make in their writing that are so minute, most people never notice them. But one of the joys of proofreading is finding these tiny errors and correcting them, even if it’s not something readers will pick up on. We want the novels that cross our desk to be absolutely spotless, which means hunting down these minute missteps and wiping them clean. So today I’d like to write about one of the most commonly overlooked grammatical issues we see during our book editing: comma splices. Commas are such tiny, wishy-washy little buggers, many people assume they can be used or omitted at will. Not so! There are some hard and fast comma rules, so let’s review the one that trips up even the cleverest of indie authors: Commas splices If you are using a conjunction to connect two clauses, do you need a comma? Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. You DO need a comma if the clauses are independent. Basically, if the clauses on either side of your conjunction both have a subject and and a verb, use a comma to separate them You DO NOT need comma if one of the clauses is dependent, meaning it borrows the subject from another clause. Here are some examples:

The monster enjoyed the taste of human flesh, but she had a heart of gold nonetheless. The villagers feared the monster and could not comprehend her soft side.

The first of these very true sentences needs a comma, because the conjunction (“but”) separates two independent clauses. The first clause has a subject and verb (“monster” and “enjoyed”), and the second also has a subject and verb (“she” and “had”). The second sentence does not need a comma, because the conjunction (“and”) separates two dependent clauses. The first clause has a subject and verb (“villagers” and “feared”), but the second only has a verb (“could”) and refers back to the subject from the first clause. Complex? Yes, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes second nature. Now, there’s one little word of warning: Be careful with “as”! Technically, it only acts as a subordinating conjunction when it’s being used as a synonym for “because,” not when it’s working as a synonym for “while.” So:

You should make me a cup of tea, as I’m dying of thirst.

vs.

You should make me a cup of tea as I work on my NaNoWriMo manuscript.

It might seem complicated, but it’s the stuff we professional novel editors thrive on!

—Liam Carnahan, Founder and Chief Editor of Invisible Ink Editing

Tags comma usage, commas, conjunctions, grammar