So, now that we’re into the helpful part of the podcast and no longer talking about women in love with the alligators that attacked them or dogs and cats breaking records together, we thought we’d take a quick look at a big grammar mistake.
And that’s when INTO is one word or two.
Is it . . .
Dude, I am so into you.
Or is it . . .
Dude, I am so in to you.
Here’s how it works.
INTO all as one word is a preposition, which means it’s showing MOVEMENT of one thing to another thing.
But IN TO (two words) has two grammatical bits going on right there. The IN is an adverb and the TO is the preposition. And they aren’t like snuggled up in bed like a cohabitating couple, they just tend to show up in the sentence next to each other.
Here are some examples:
INTO as one word:
Baby, I made it into the office today, but only just barely because… cough… you know.
Lordie, look what Santa put into your stocking.
That alligator went into that woman’s head, man, like took total control.
INTO usually tells you WHERE something is happening.
IN TO as two words
Look, I am standing in to make a statement to our senator.
Santa came in to say a hearty hello.
The dog and cat rode in to break that record on that damn scooter.
IN TO usually can be substituted with IN ORDER TO.
Easy, right? Consider yourself grammatical.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Two words are different than one.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Sometimes taking chances pays off (like when you jump on a scooter with a cat) and sometimes it doesn’t (like when you bite your handler’s hand). Choose your risks wisely. And that goes for copyediting too. Unless you’re super sure you know all the grammar, don’t copyedit your own story.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
LINKS WE MENTION IN THE RANDOM THOUGHTS PORTION OF THE PODCAST
If someone writes its for it’s or lay for lie? It doesn’t mean they deserve to die or get your hairy eyeball of judgement. It just means they made a mistake. It’s part of being human. And it’s okay.
All you all,
I am the WORST copyeditor for my own work. I’ll admit it and that’s because as a writer, I’m too close to it to pick out my errors, right?
That’s why it’s good to have other people read your stories before you put them out there.
Every day or everyday
What the what, right? There’s a difference?
Yes, yes, there is.
Everyday when it’s all one word is an adjective. That means it’s describing something that happens all the time.
Dreaming about manatees is an everyday occurrence for Carrie.
Every day when it’s two separate words is an adverbial phrase. Doesn’t that sound fancy and terrifying? Adverbial phrase.
It just means “each day.”
Every day Carrie dreams about manatees.
The magic apostrophe
I talk about apostrophes a lot and that’s because a lot of us just haven’t gotten the memo yet. That’s okay! Don’t be hard on yourself. Here’s the memo again.
Apostrophes have two main jobs.
Job #1 is to show that something is possessing something else. No! Not in an exorcism kind of way, but an ownership kind of way.
The manatee’s flipper was so cute.
The manatee owns that flipper. It possesses it.
Job #2 is to show there’s some letters missing because we have smooshed or contracted two words together.
So, ‘It is’ becomes it’s. The apostrophe is replacing the I in ‘is.’
Or ‘they are’ becomes they’re. The apostrophe is replacing the A in ‘are.’
A lot of us write a word and maybe that word ends in an s. We go, “AH! It ends in an s. There should be an apostrophe in there, right? I shall put one in.”
Right: Apostrophes are cute little buggers and it’s hard to resist them.
Wrong: Apostrophe’s are cute little buggers and it’s hard to resist them.
Lose it or Loose it?
These words are evil little buttfaces. It’s that double ‘o’ versus single ‘o’ that gets our brains all hooked up. Choose or chose has this issue too.
Why are those o’s so confusing? I don’t know, but I do know that when I was little, I loved to put pupils inside them and make a smiley face.
LOOSE means not tight. It rhymes with booze!
LOSE means you have lost something. You poor honey.
CHOOSE means you have to make a choice. It’s the present. It’s happening now. It also rhymes with booze!
CHOSE means you already made that choice. Are you regretting it?
Spoiler Alert: Don’t be a douchebag about other people’s grammar mistakes.
Here’s the thing: We are all human. We all make mistakes. It is not the end of the world and other humans (the good ones) shouldn’t be trolls about it. No offense to trolls. But we all have to be a little less harsh, a little less judgmental and a lot more understanding and forgiving.
If someone writes its for it’s or lay for lie? It doesn’t mean they deserve to die or get your hairy eyeball of judgement. It just means they made a mistake. It’s part of being human. And it’s okay.
BE A PART OF OUR MISSION!
Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.
Want to be part of the team? Send us a quick (or long) email and we’ll read it here and on our YouTube channel.
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
Okay, recently I’ve been working on a lot of people’s stories that are fantastic except for one thing—one easily fixable thing—they have semicolons everywhere.
The semicolon is that little bit of punctuation that looks like there’s a comma on the bottom and a period topping it. And judging from people’s use of it? It’s an addictive, sexy beast.
Most people think they understand the semicolon. It’s a period topping a comma, right? You use it to do something or um … yeah …?
Here’s the thing, a semicolon is a divider. It’s like a comma and a period that way, but it’s not. It creates a different length of the pause for the reader between the words that it divides.
Yes! There are different levels of pause.
Here check it out. We’ll do it with three sentences.
The first is a comma, but it will be a minimal pause.
Shaun wanted to talk about naughty things, but Carrie was not going to let him do that today.
Here is that same sentiment but with a medium-weight pause.
Shaun wanted to talk about naughty things; Carrie was not going to let him do that today.
Here is the same sentiment with the pause heavyweight fighter, the period.
Shaun wanted to talk about naughty things. Carrie was not going to let him do that today.
Your punctuation choice controls the pacing of your paragraph and sentence and if you put 18 of them in one paragraph? You’re going to slow down the pace of your story and also make readers get crinkly noses and hate you.
So how do you use semicolons?
There are three major ways to use this sexy beast.
One. To connect a certain kind of thing.
Semicolons connect two independent clauses. You know something is an independent clause if it can stand alone as it’s very own sentence.
It’s like using the conjunction and between two independent clauses to show they are really related.
Shaun is wearing big boy pants; he has been for forty-five years.
Two. To separate things in a list (sometimes).
If you’ve got a weird list with lots of internal punctuation, then you can start that list off with a semicolon. Here’s an example.
My wife had a list of things that she wanted me to accomplish that day and it included taking out the trash; going into the basement to look at the copper pipes which, by the way, are boring to look at and are not linking; and singing—I’m a horrible singer, by the way—a whole mess of show tunes and not the ones from Hamilton for some reason.
Three. Conjunctive adjective moments
These are tricky beasts, but mostly happen with these words when they join two independent clauses.
The words are:
moreover,
nevertheless,
however,
otherwise,
therefore,
then,
finally,
likewise,
consequently.
Here’s a quick example.
Shaun had been told that he should definitely not fart in the bed at night; however, Shaun decided that this household rule was absolutely unfair.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
So there you go. Don’t put semicolons everywhere because that’s a flag to agents, editors or readers. Use them when you need to because they can really help for clarity in lists, but remember too much of a good thing is a bad thing in writing.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Embrace the semicolon. You can change direction in your life, lean into the pause, but not into the end.
In our random thoughts section at the beginning of the podcast, we talk about the people in South Carolina filming their procreation acts everywhere and wonder why there is no Maine Man when there are so many Florida Men.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
A lot of us humans and writers spend a lot of time trying to impress people by being extra wordy.
And it seems like we’re all trying to avoid the word “because.”
This is extremely cruel to the word “because,” which probably gets hurt feelings, but it’s also super cruel to your readers and/or listeners who deserve clarity.
They need to understand what you’re putting down.
So, when it comes to “because,” we do not need to say:
The reason is because (that’s redundant).
Due to the fact that
On the grounds that
On account of
If you sound like a lawyer in a bad tv procedural?
You’re trying too hard.
HERE IS CONTRARY ADVICE….
“BECAUSE” OR “SINCE” CAN SOMETIMES FORCE YOU TO BE WORDY.
With the words ‘because’ and ‘since,’ you can almost always use either one. They are interchangeable BFFs.
Here are some examples.
Because I hate you, I decided to date.
Since I hate you, I decided to date.
They both mean “because” here because they are synonyms.
But sometimes “since” means “from the time’ instead of ‘because.’
Since we went to Disney, I’ve been crushing on Pluto.
That means “ever since the time they went to Disney” not “because.”
But you might not know that, right?
So, instead you might want to be wordy.
You don’t want to be ambiguous and have people wondering if you mean “because” or “ever since the time they went to Disney.”
The whole point in writing and talking is for people to understand you, so don’t be a schmuck. Be clear.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Don’t be wordy and know what your words mean and what they’re conveying to the reader.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Listen more than you speak. Look for clues in your environment and people’s actions so you can really understand them.
RANDOM THOUGHT
To hear about punks, stabbings and vampires, you have to listen to the podcast file. Sorry! We only put the advice part in the notes.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
On one of my Patreon sites I read and print chapters of unpublished YA novels. THE LAST GODS and SAINT and now ALMOST DEAD. This is a monthly membership site (Hear the book chapters – $1/month, read them $3-month, plus goodies!). Sometimes I send people art! Art is fun.
On this, my second site, WRITE BETTER NOW, you can do a one-time purchase of a writing class or get two of my books in eBook form or just support our podcast or the dogs. It’s all part of the WRITING CLASS OF AWESOME.
It’s a super fun place to hang out, learn, read, and see my weirdness in its true form.
Subordinate clauses are baby clauses that can’t stand all by themselves as complete thoughts and they demand a certain kind of punctuation – or lack of punctuation.
Here are examples:
If I can find Santa, then we can go party.
We can go party if Santa ever freaking shows up.
So, in both of those sentences there is a clause can’t stand alone as a complete thought:
If I can find Santa
If Santa ever freaking shows up.
A subordinate clause or supporting clause is basically a clause that’s supporting the show-stopping regular clause, right? These clauses do not get a comma before them if they are at the end of the sentence.
HOW TO DEAL
There are words that always lead off these clauses. What I do is go back and do a find/replace in my work (or client’s work) when I’m copyediting.
Helpful hint for writers: If you include the comma in the find/replace search, it makes it so much easier.
Those words are…
These conjunctions:
After, although, as, because, before, even if, even though, if, in order that, once, provided that, rather than, since, so that, than, that, though, unless, until, when, whenever, where, whereas, whether, while, why, for, therefore, hence, consequently, and due to.
And these relative pronouns that make the world of the clause even trickier. They are part of relative clauses but then these overachievers? Well, they are part of a subculture called restrictive or nonrestrictive clauses.
These are the relative pronouns
that, which, who, whom, whichever, whoever, whomever, and whose.
Are you Restrictive or Nonrestrictive Mr. Clause?
These pronouns start either restrictive clauses or nonrestrictive clauses. Restrictive clauses also like to be called essential clauses because they are alpha like that, but also because they are – you guessed it – essential to the sentence meaning and shouldn’t be separated by a comma
Do you enjoy watching Santa Claus employ lots of elves that wear sexy sweaters?
No comma before that because the sentence needs to know the qualifier for its meaning.
But in a nonrestrictive clause? Well, you don’t have that happen. Here’s an example:
Watching Santa, who employs a lot of elves wearing sexy sweaters, is pretty freaking awesome.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Subordinate the proper things.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
It’s not about domination. It’s about understanding restrictions.
And there you go. Grammar Moment with Dogs are Smarter Than People. Happy Holidays!
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
