Woe Is I by Patricia T. O’Conner

Have you ever gone to your resources hoping to find rules for using  a word like “that” and come away feeling like your brain had been in a blender? The experience is a frequent one for me. My Word Processor will tag something as incorrect grammar. I’ll digest the reason it gives but I’ve learned not to stop there. Aside from an innate distrust of all things Microshaft, I’ve found ol’ Bill’s boys to be just plain wrong at times and uninformed in others. So, I check to see what White Smoke has to say. If this doesn’t satisfy me, I’ll proceed to the online Chicago Manual of Style or one of my reference books. Usually, this is a mistake because my net discovery is inconsistencies between the references. I’d like to standardize on the Chicago Manual of Style, but digging therein for a grammatical rule can make the search for Tut’s Tomb seem trivial.

My salvation may be “Woe Is I”  by Patricia T. O’Conner. From what I’ve seen so far, she explains English usage in an entertaining,  sprite like manner. She doesn’t try to explain the difference between a participle and a partridge, but gives witty memory-joggers to correct usage. I’d love to know the technical rule for why I shouldn’t use “lugubrious” with a particular antecedent, but before I can understand, I have to know the difference between an antecedent and an anteater, and so on. At seventy years of age, I’m not at all certain I have time for that.

Perhaps Patrticia will provide me with the tool I need to produce better prose

John

The Constabulary Deals With Driver Distractions

 Pull Over!

What more can be said about this?

It doesn’t have anything to do with writing. It relates to Motorcycles and Humor, both of which are dear to my heart.

Wizards for Word

Oops. In addition to the mangled prose in yesterday’s post, there is an inaccuracy.

When using the Novel Writer wizard, the formatting of the chapter number and title on the first page of a chapter is consistent with the Writer’s Digest recommendation.

The problem is using Repair Wizard on text not written with the Novel Writer Wizard. That’s when the first page of the chapter gets geebled.

Has anybody found a way around this?

Wizards for Word

Has anyone out there used “Wizards for Word?”

One of the functions in this group of add-ons to Microsoft Word is to check text for conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style. I used this function on my first novel with moderate success.

The experience may have been better if I had used the wizards during the creation of the text (recommended), but the book was already written when I became aware of the product.

Since the package offers a slew of neat features, I determined to use it as recommended when creating the sequel.

Right off the bat, I ran into trouble. The wizard doesn’t seem to like the Writer’s Digest manuscript format. WD recommends that each chapter start on a fresh page with six or so blank lines followed by the chapter number & title, six more blank lines and then text. When I attempt to do things this way, the wizard wants to get rid of all the blank lines.

Does anybody have experience with this, ideas about it?

Hi,

This is John Burnham—a programming and network installation burnout. Since that experience left me hating all things related to Microshaft, I’ve been fairly successful in avoiding net-related stuff for a number of years.

However, my publisher tells me that I need a blog. Now that I’m getting into it, I’m looking forward to reading what you have to say about my novel and a few other matters which will appear on the pages.