By Melinda Goodin Those who have read my work know that my stories tend to start with a bang — literally. If it’s not a space station exploding, it’s a church catching on fire or a laboratory or… And the pace gets faster from there. Critiquers have often commented that they ended up feeling breathless…
Month: March 2019
Lessons Learned: Writing & Illustrating an Amazon Best-Selling Children’s Picture Book
To begin, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dani Alcorn for inviting me to write a guest blog post for Writing Academy. My debut children’s picture book, Nobody Loves Mustard, unexpectedly became: An Amazon Best Selling New Release A Number 1 Best Seller (Top 100 Free) A Number 1 Best Seller (Top…
What to Do About ‘Or’?
Today let’s talk about how to make sure subjects and verbs agree when a word like “or” comes into play. There can be more to this than meets the eye. This grammar game begins with a few terms to help you keep the rules in hand. The subject is the person, thing, or idea directing…
How to Get Over Yourself, Grammatically Speaking
Myself. Yourself. Herself. Himself. Itself. Ourselves. Themselves. Yourselves. What are these words and how do we use them? They’re pronouns. (Quick refresher: Pronouns step in for nouns. They save us lots of boring repetition.) “Mrs. Smith baked a pie, and she shared it with her first grade class.” Without pronouns, look what happens to this…
Effective Ways to use ‘Affect’ in a Sentence (or Affecting uses of ‘Effect’)
If you do a search for “most common grammar errors,” the affect/effect duo is going to turn up. These two words are homophones. That means they sound alike. Well, they’re almost homophones; though not identical, they sound very much alike. We can see the difference in their spellings, but we don’t always hear it when…