"A Lesson In Grammar" For All Aspiring Authors.

Ok, so this is more like a rant, but nevertheless, it is important.

I have just gone through all the writing in the critique section on Mistress Journals Erotic Stories Forum and editied it to the best of my ability, and a few things have remained consistant among the various authors and stories - grammatical errors.
Here, I am going to outline the worst of them, and hopefully provide some tips on how to improve, assuming I don't get too carried away in my rant.






First up we have the humble ellipsis. The ellipsis is a series of three full stops one after the other: "..."
The ellipsis is not more and not less than three full stops. So why do people insist on writing lines of these? It does not serve any purpose. The ellipsis itself provides the necessary pause whereas this: "........................................" just serves to be a nuisance for me to clean up.


Next up, we have the apostrophe: ' this is usually used to denote one or more missing letters at the end or part way through a word. Examples include: flamin', "can't", "don't", "won't" etc in the first instance the apostrophe indicates a missing "G", in every other case that I have presented, the apostrophe denotes a contraction, that is, shortening of a word or phrase to form another word with the same meaning. E.g. "cannot", "do not", "will not". A possessive apostrophe is usually used in a name. For example: "Billy's cat was missing". Without the apostrophe there, one is led to assume that "Billys Cat, was missing" It's like it becomes a name unto itself.

Another source of frustration is the mis use of the full stop and comma. The full stop is used at the end of a sentence and should IMMEDIATELY be folowed by a capital letter. A comma is used to break up a sentence to allow the reader to take a breath. I'm sure none of you speak like this without taking a breath in between of this abnormally long sentence because if you did you would probably collapse of exhaustion if you did not involuntarily take a breath in the appropriate spots.

You see what I did there? I wrote one whole long sentence that could, and should, have been broken up with commas. Except that I did not. Made it very difficult to read, didn't it?

My final grievance has to do with the proper use of "a" and "an". If the word following after it begins with a consonant (i.e. not a vowel, or vowel sound letter, like "H") then the preceding word should be "A". If it IS succeeded by a vowel, or vowel sounding letter (like "H"), then the preceding word should be "AN". Capiche?

Well, I hope this has been informative to all you wrioters, and I look forward to reading your properly punctuated, grammatically good and structurally sound stories.

Until next time
Happy writing,
Belthizor
Assistant Editor for Mistress Journals