Schaefer Wordsmithing helps you with more than editing your writing; we provide articles and posts offering tips and other guidance on writing, grammar, and usage to help you improve your writing.
Below are some of our more recent articles organized by topic.
Writing
The Passive Voice Is Nothing to Fear
The passive voice is one of the most popular no-nos for good English writing. Most style guides—and writing software like Microsoft Word and Grammarly—will tell you: avoid using the passive…
Show, Don’t Tell
Lower Manhattan, well after the Dutch. Photo by Seva Kruhlov on Pexels.com There are a lot of things to keep straight when you’re writing a story: characters, plot, setting, timeline,…
One Weird Trick for Better Writing
Okay, I promise it’s not that weird; it’s just fun to appropriate click-bait headlines. And I won’t make you sit through a 25-minute video or scroll through pages of text…
Grammar
The Sequence of Tenses in Reported Speech
In every language, there is a grammatical rule that is so embedded into the language that its native speakers are barely aware of it, even as non-native students of the…
Ending a Sentence with a Preposition
There’s an old joke that goes something like this: Some cowboys are mingling at the bar when an Oxford graduate walks in. “Howdy, stranger,” one cowboy says. “Where are you…
To Boldly Split Infinitives
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go…
Usage
Minding Your aPostrophes and Quotation Marks
In the old days of writing with a typewriter, there was no option to distinguish between an apostrophe ( ’ ) and a single quotation mark ( ‘ )—they were typed with the same…
On Capitalizing “Black” and “White” When Talking about Race
Questions of racial justice and equity have occupied—as they should—a large role in our national discourse of late. A long-overdue examination of the embedded biases and structural inequities in our…
Hyphens, En Dashes, and Em Dashes: What’s the Difference Between -, –, and —?
Hyphens, En Dashes, and Em Dashes have been around for quite some time, but contemporary writers are not always sure how they should be used or what the difference is…
Reflection
On Capitalizing “Black” and “White” When Talking about Race
Questions of racial justice and equity have occupied—as they should—a large role in our national discourse of late. A long-overdue examination of the embedded biases and structural inequities in our…
On Being Original
For centuries old was better. Old meant tried-and-true, reliable, dependable. This was especially true in the ancient world. The Romans gave a pass to Jewish religious observances because they were…
Acknowledging the Land
With this post, I’m taking a break from our regular posts with grammar, writing, and language tips. Today, I’m reflecting on the wonderful locations where Schaefer Wordsmithing has a physical…
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