Refresh and Recheck Your English Skills
By Annette Rey
English and non-English first language speakers, listen up! The site mentioned below may be one of the most useful you will find to help you improve your speaking and writing of English. It will also increase your understanding of English. Understanding the core of a subject is when the light bulb shines in your brain and makes learning the rest of the material easier.
The site is: Continue reading
For Real World Writing News
By Annette Rey
The Sites for Writers category is growing on my site and most of them are instructional and educational sites for writers to improve their writing skills. I have taken to numbering the posts so my readers (and I) can keep track of them.
The ones I mention today don’t directly fall into that category.
Find the Gold
By Annette Rey
Here I am with more sites for writers. I hope you are cataloging them somewhere in a file on your desktop.
The list is growing.
A Wealth of Information
By Annette Rey
Don’t let this site intimidate you. I say this because on first glance you might be insulted and say, “This is not for me. I’m an adult. This is for children.” And I say, no this site is great for adult writers to use.
Let me explain.
They Just Keep Coming
By Annette Rey
This site has some surprisingly versatile subject matter (over 187 million) and could be useful to writers in various ways, as well as to young students and any-age inquiring minds. The site can be used to stimulate a writer with ideas and to collect information he has not thought of before to include in his writing projects. There are quizzes and visual games, too.
This One May Help
By Annette Rey
Serious writers have to cover all the aspects of getting their work on the page, checking grammar, editing for content and punctuation, finding a venue, marketing their work, and more. And so, any help is appreciated.
A Little Help Goes a Long Way
By Annette Rey
I am here to help writers with the smallest of details. And it can be a small detail that catapults your work to notice or gives you a bad name as a writer.
A Lost Practice
By Annette Rey
I believe if you have a familiarity with diagramming sentences, you will create better sentences. And where a sentence just doesn’t seem right, diagramming can be a great tool to lead you in the right direction to correct your sentence.
The tool is:
By Annette Rey
On occasion, I have used the following sites as I create my work. The first three are sites to help you correct your work. The last one is a one-stop idea/information site to flesh out your work. Give these sites a try and rest easier that your efforts are going out with fewer errors and a lot more punch.
http://classroom.synonym.com/ – This site can hardly be described – there is so much to see and learn. I found it by checking on a grammar issue. It has info on psychological tests, how to write a weather report, how to search for a Canadian address, how to find people in Russia. Under the category College, I found information on special collections at libraries that have rare books and archives and special manuscripts. I found an article How to Find Good Resources for Writing an Essay, by Jen Saunders. The article has very concrete info on where and how to start a credible essay, add opposing views and challenge a theory, and more. Anyone can find something of value on this site, especially writers.
http://www.k12reader.com/ – This site is not just for children. It boasts thousands of free, printable reading and writing worksheets that cover spelling, reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, writing, and more. Every writer has some area in which he lacks knowledge. So, bite the bullet and rake in what you need to make your written work stand out from the others.
http://www.titlecapitalization.com/ – This site is a simple page with a box. Just start plugging in the title of your piece and the program automatically capitalizes the appropriate words. You can choose AP style, Chicago Manual of Style, or capitalize words with five or more letters. So, your first line, your title, will be sure to impress.
http://www.worldatlas.com/ – Have you found yourself writing a flash fiction or another work and, unplanned by you, a thought enters your head to include something about an unfamiliar location? Perhaps, it’s Canada, or Winnipeg in particular, or something about native plants in Canada, or population of its cities, names of its airports, rivers, territories, etc. Or you may want to include something about islands in the Pacific, but you don’t know where to start. At this site, all you have to do is click on the category continents, and it seems a list of every island in the world comes up. Click on one of them to reveal individual facts. For a writer, here is more fodder than meets the eye. Article titles could trip a chord with you and off you go with a new idea and a new writing project. Who wants to believe in writer’s block?
You Really Need to Use This Software
By Annette Rey
Writers, how familiar are you with multiple predicate commas? And do you add a comma when there are less than three predicates? Do you miss adding determiners in your sentences? What about missing a comma to isolate a clause? How about adding an unnecessary hyphen or not adding a necessary hyphen? How about the rule to make a word a gerund so it can act as a noun?
I thought so. Not many of us do know all the rules of grammar. Read on to see how the free program at Grammarly.com can instruct you and make you more confident in your work before you press send.
Writer's Block No More 