by Language Arts Lady | Apr 28, 2020 | Articles, Grammar, Punctuation Puzzles
Colons are seriously hard! If people use them at all, they often use them wrong. Generally speaking, people use colons following a speech tag in two instances (both of which are incorrect): a. Following any speech tag— Donna said: “This is how you use...
by Language Arts Lady | Apr 24, 2020 | Articles, Grammar, Punctuation Puzzles
If you want to show off in your writing, use a quotation properly. If you want to REALLY show off in your writing, use a split quote properly. Okay, maybe only one to three percent of the people reading your writing will know that your split quote has been written...
by Language Arts Lady | Apr 23, 2020 | Articles, Grammar, Punctuation Puzzles
Two of my least favorite things to teach: direct/indirect objects (and predicate nominatives) AND degrees of comparison. (Okay, maybe that is like my four least favorite things to teach!) The first ones (direct/indirect/pn) are just soooo complicated (and they can’t...
by Language Arts Lady | Apr 21, 2020 | Articles, Grammar, Punctuation Puzzles
Subjective. Objective. Big words (as many grammar terms are—adjectival clause or appositive, anyone?) to teach to young student. And yet, even young students need to know when to use he and him—less they end up saying, “Him took my toy” into adulthood! Like everything...
by Language Arts Lady | Apr 20, 2020 | Articles, Punctuation Puzzles
Today’s Punctuation Puzzle brings to light an important comma rule that is not readily known. Commas are super subjective and thus challenging to write with. So whenever we can have a fairly fool-proof trick (or tricks in this week’s puzzle!) up our sleeve to make the...