Word nerds rejoice! Imagine a word game where you can have fun and win cash prizes by leveraging your vast vocabulary. Well, it exists, and it is called HQ Words. The game was created by the same team who came up with the widely popular HQ Trivia. On HQ Trivia you compete in real time … Read more
So you’d like your latest writing project to get moving faster. Great writers have felt the same. Don’t worry, it’s fixable. When the words stop, writers have effective ways of getting them moving again. Plow new ground Write multiple drafts instead of obsessively editing the same one. You can tell the same story, but tell … Read more
If you are still on the fence about becoming a DailyWritingTips Pro subscriber, here are five reasons that will certainly convince you to join today. 1. 50% discount ($3.99 per month) The regular price of the subscription is $7.99 per month. For a limited time we are offering the subscription with a 50% discount, so … Read more
If you read my post of resume tips a few weeks ago, you’ll already be familiar with best practice for writing a great resume. While there’s nothing wrong with hand-crafting your resume in Microsoft Word (or your word processor of choice), there are plenty of online tools that can save you lots of time by … Read more
All writers need a helping hand now and again – and having the best tools at your fingertips can make a huge difference. I’ve picked my favourite tools that will work for almost all writers – whether you’re a blogger, a novelist, a freelancer, or (like me) a bit of everything. We’ll take a look … Read more
Will robots eventually have writers out of a job? Are we going to see computers writing the next Great American Novel? Probably not … at least, not any time soon. Over the last decade or so, though, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has become increasingly sophisticated … and it’s influencing the world of writing in a number … Read more
Discussions below explain the mistakes in the examples given, which err in mistaking essential and nonessential clauses and vice versa. A revision accompanying each sample sentence demonstrates correct form. An essential (or restrictive) word, phrase, or clause is one that is necessary for conveying the intended meaning of a sentence. When the essential element follows … Read more
Sentences (and clauses) that begin with with are doomed to be weak. The following sentences suffer from this affliction; discussions describe how to improve the sentence, and revisions demonstrate the solutions. 1. With a quarter-billion-dollar industry possible, there is a real possibility of supporting the community with something other than an economy based on a … Read more
Using italics and quotation marks to emphasize words and phrases is a useful technique, but for the sake of clarity, such formatting should be used only in the manner described in this post. Italics help readers understand that a word is being presented as the label for a concept and not as a concept itself, … Read more
The three words in the headline for this post, and words derived from them—listed and defined below—stem from a common source. Plan, plain, and plane all derive from the Latin adjective planus, meaning “clear,” “even,” “flat, level,” and “plain.” Plan comes from the French word meaning “map”; the English word, originally a technical term in … Read more
Cross, a word with a great variety of meanings, is also at the head of an extensive family of words, some of which are listed and defined in this post. Cross made its way into English circuitously from the Latin word crux, with stops in Old Irish and Old Norse. It originally referred to a … Read more
Efforts to describe something idiomatically with the use of metaphor—a word or phrase that figuratively provides an analogy—more than once in a sentence will likely distractingly interfere with reading comprehension, so avoid using more than one metaphor in a sentence, or at least ensure that they are complementary. Discussions after each example in this post … Read more