a “Verbal Knightcap” by Robert M. Knight, AIW Board Member
The use of active voice might be the least understood element in English that most people think they understand. They understand even less when they get the use of active voice confused with the use of action verbs. And many do. Many editors can’t keep them straight.
Fact is, they aren’t even related. They just sound as if they are. A sentence written in active voice can include a “being” verb.
Assam is an Indian state.
And a sentence written in passive voice can include an action verb.
Nicholas O’Herlihy was named after his maternal grandfather, a Russian.
Active voice and action verbs do have one thing in common. They contribute to strong, honest, direct writing.
If the subject of a sentence creates the action, the sentence is in active voice. Active voice is the exact opposite of the sentence-wrecker known as passive voice. Here’s an example of passive voice: Read More »
by AIW President Claude Berube
Pubs. They took their name from Public Houses. When I lived in rural England, it seemed that every few miles there was a village of fifty homes, an Anglican church that dated from the 1200s and a pub that seemed just as old. There the regulars and even [...]
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by Mark Tarallo, AIW Vice President
Think back twenty years, to 1989. The internet and email pretty much unheard of. Most did not have a personal computer, or a cell phone. Cutting-edge personal technology? A fancy answering machine.
Day-to-day life in 1989 was substantially different than it is today. One could almost say it was another [...]
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by Deborah Wunderman, AIW Board Member
Your client with whom you have worked for many years has hired another freelance writer—and now requests your help in transitioning a new consultant to do what you once did as well as wants copies of materials and documents previously sent to them. Recently finding myself in this situation, I [...]
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by Jessie Siegel, AIW Board Member
As a writer, I find myself perpetually at odds with the adage: write what you know. Too often it is taken literally, as an injunction to approach only subject matter that comes from one’s own experience. Frequently, this results in fiction that is simply veiled autobiography. Unless the life is [...]
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a “Verbal Knightcap” by Robert M. Knight, AIW Board Member
It’s unruly, and harsh. Its spelling can be ludicrous. But English might well be the most beautiful of the dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects we call Indo-European. Depends on your definition of beauty.
That definition requires that we forget the sophisticated sound of French, the [...]
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by AIW Board Member Andrew W.M. Beierle
I’ve just returned from the Atlanta Gay Literary Festival, where I was invited to read from my second novel, First Person Plural. It was a sentimental journey: the first time in two years I have returned to the place I called home for more than a quarter century. A [...]
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by Clyde T. Linsley, AIW Board Member
For the past few years I’ve been writing fiction almost exclusively, but most of my 40-some-odd years as a professional writer were spent writing nonfiction. And mostly, it was journalistic writing.
I wrote for newspapers, radio, television, I edited magazines, and I wrote for various web sites. Nearly all of [...]
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by Deborah Wunderman, AIW Board Member
I have worked as a freelance proposal writer for 10 years in the Washington, D.C., area. During this time, I have encountered many wonderful clients and some not-so-wonderful ones.
The economic crisis has demanded much tightening of budgets and doing more with less. It has also brought to the surface [...]
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by Jessie Siegel, AIW Board Member
Why do I write? Today, I write because characters keep roaming through my head—characters with pasts and futures that I must put down on paper or no one but me will know they exist, and they’ll fade away. Last year, or the year before, the driving motivation was often a [...]
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