New Years Resolutions best Wishes Good Writing Grammar Punctuation
New Year is just around the corner and all around the world the spirit of well being, happiness and prosperity envelops all mankind. The Christmas season gathered together most families, filling them with joy, hope and best wishes for a future life.
Writers, like everybody else, would like to improve certain aspects of our lives, to progress in what we do best, writing. In order to achieve that, we might consider an analysis of certain basic rules of writing that could help us accomplish excellence in our profession. We must focus our efforts on finding ways to help us improve all aspects of our writing, such as spelling, grammar, punctuation, word order, proper use of capital letters, and good use of the paragraph to communicate our ideas coherently.
New year´s resolutions for any writer, some of which I consider of vital importance, and which are contained within the elementary rules of usage, would be the following:
Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas; that is the additional information that can be included in a sentence, but is not essential to the meaning of the sentence: "when my parents got married, in January 2nd, 1964, they had a big party." The part enclosed between commas (in January 2nd, 1964) is a parenthetic expression. The sentence would communicate the idea without the parenthetic expression: "when my parents got married, they had a big party."
Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause: The storm calmed down today, and the pouring waters will not inundate the city. The task is complicated, but the astronauts will find the way to solve the problem.
In the examples above, the relation is that of cause and result. The two sentences might be rewritten: as the storm calmed down today, the pouring waters will not inundate the city. Although the task is complicated, the astronauts will find the way to solve the problem.
Do not use periods instead of commas: I saw that strange object in the sky. Coming from school. He was an outstanding doctor. A man who had studied in the best universities.
In these examples, the first period should be replaced by a comma and the following word written with a capital letter. I saw that strange object in the sky, coming from school. He was an outstanding doctor, a man who had studied in the best universities.
We should strive to attain good writing skills that would make us more competitive within the circle of our community, and that would bring us nearer to the group of successful writers that we all want to become.
