Category: Writing Style

Sentence Unity Before you start this lesson, you might want to review this basic lesson on sentences. I’m building on those basics here. Sentence unity refers to several concepts: noun-pronoun agreement, subject-verb agreement, tense agreement, and using one idea per sentence. It’s that last idea that we’ll look at here. Multi-Idea Problems In the lesson…

Active Voice Most English sentences are active, meaning they have a subject that is doing the action. In contrast, a passive sentence has a subject that has the action done to it. Active: Eli is serving dinner. Passive: Dinner is being served by Eli. As these examples show, when you change an active sentence into…

Adding Emphasis Not all thoughts are equal. You don’t expect your readers to remember everything that you write, but you hope that they’ll remember your key ideas. You can emphasize your main points with formatting and writing techniques. Inversion Sentences usually follow a subject-verb-object order. You can add emphasis by using the shock factor of…

Cliches A cliche is a phrase that is so overused that it’s become meaningless. Using cliches makes you seem boring, uncreative, and lazy. Identifying Cliches The first step to eliminating cliches is identifying them. If you’re using a phrase that you’ve heard before, it’s likely a cliche. You can also search for a cliche here.…

Paragraph Unity Like sentences, readable paragraphs are unified and coherent. A paragraph is a group of sentences all focused on one idea. Stick to the Topic In academic writing, each paragraph has a topic sentence that states the idea for that paragraph. You might find this style too formal for your online writing, but you…

Split Infinitives If I controlled the English language, we wouldn’t need this lesson because split infinitives should be a non-issue. Unfortunately, self-appointed know-it-alls are still insisting the split infinitives are wrong, even though they aren’t. So, what’s the issue? Split Infinitives: A Problem? An infinitive is the word “to” plus a verb. Examples: to conspire,…