These hints and tips are aimed at everyone; from primary school, through high school and all the way up to post-graduate Honours, Masters and PHD level.
We start off with basic advice for those children who are starting off in grade R, which is for learners who are just starting to learn to read and write.
As a general rule, it is best to start with simple sentences expressed as a subject noun such as school, boy, girl, house etc; followed by a verb (an action word such as skip, run, play, read), followed by an object noun.
Sentences expressed in this way are easy to understand for both the learner and the reader, and the meaning is clear. They form the building blocks of the English language.
At higher levels, but still in primary school, concepts such as tenses, active and passive voice, syntax (word order) first, second and third person, commas and semi colons, quotation marks (double and single). Past tense should be used wherever possible in stories and books; as the events portrayed have usually already happened.
In our editing work at Busy Bee Editing, we are constantly simplifying unnecessarily long, complicated sentences with inaccurate word choices, poor syntax and complete failure to use speech marks.
As writers, the golden rule is to write accurately, directly with appropriate punctuation and appropriate word choices as much as possible; “Brevity is the Soul of Wit” William Shakespeare (Hamlet). It is an absolute pleasure to read material that reflects these principles. John Steinbeck is a perfect example of a writer who writes cleanly and simply and all his books reflect this.
Long, rambling paragraphs that never seem to end are extremely boring for the reader, who will very quickly lose interest – so it is much better to break the paragraphs up into shorter sentences.
Watch this space for more tips.
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