It seemed all I could hear was 'snap' 'snap' 'snap' ... "What ARE you doing?" I asked my teenage daughter. "Why are you constantly taking pictures of yourself, or the floor, or the ceiling ...?"
The answer I got was: "I'm on Snapchat!"
Oh, of course. Silly me.
"Why don't you download it?"
"Why would I want to keep taking pictures of myself and sending them to people?" I asked.
"Because it's fun. Anyway, the picture and chat disappear once you've read it."
Oh! Pointless?!
Anyhow ... I've finally succumbed and downloaded Snapchat onto my phone. My daughter had to give me an in-depth lesson on how to use it - all the funny faces you can do with it, the video shots, distorted voices, and the messaging.
Before I knew it, I was really enjoying it. My grown-up daughter also has it and sends Snapchat pictures of my baby granddaughter which are hilarious (poor child).
I don't think I'll be Snapchatting anyone other than my daughters, as it would probably confirm my friends' views that I've finally lost the plot!
So, the point I'm getting to is that love it or loathe it, it has turned out to be a fantastic way to keep in touch with my teenage daughter. Historically, when she was away from me with friends or her father, I could never get any response from her by messaging, WhatsApp, email, phoning ... but with Snapchat - she always answers within at least a few hours (that's good believe me!) as she wants to keep the 'streak' (? or something) going which means you have to Snapchat that person at least once a day ...
BINGO!

Since working in a junior school, I have discovered something that I find quite sad: fewer and fewer children know the generic names of shops.
 
I was taking a group of 10-year-olds through a literal comprehension question that asked them to list the four shops you would find in a high street that sell bread, shampoo, magazines, and fruit and vegetables. The answers I got were: Tesco, Budgens, Martins, Boots and various other brand name stores. They are right of course, and two of them are grocers and would sell all of the above (not that they knew what a grocer was), but obviously that wasn’t what the question meant!
 
So, the ensuing conversation went something like this:
 
Me:        “So, at what type of shop, other than Tesco or any other supermarket, can you buy                   bread, cakes, and sandwiches from?”
Child:    “Dorringtons.”
Me:        “Yes, but what kind of shop is Dorringtons?”
Child:    “A shop that sells bread, cakes and sandwiches” (Said with rolled eyes!)
Me:        “It’s called a bakers.”
Child:    “Really? Are you sure? I’ve never heard it called that before.”
 
I decided to try a change in tack …
Me:        “What do you think you might buy in a chemists?”
              Blank look from child.
Me:        “It’s somewhere you can buy shampoo, makeup, creams …”
Child:    “Oh, you mean Boots.”
 
Me:        "What about a newsagent?”
Child:    “What is a newsagent? Never heard of one of those.”
Me:        “Somewhere you can buy newspapers, magazines, sweets …”
Child:    “Oh, you mean Martins.”
 
Me:        “Ok, how about a greengrocer?”
Child:    “A WHAT?!” 
 
I suppose it is inevitable with today’s convenience shopping. I wonder how much longer these words will exist in our language?

​This is a question most writers will have. If you Google ‘cost of editing a book’ you will find an overwhelming amount of information.
There are usually three levels: proofreading, copy editing and line (or content) editing.
 
Proofreading: This is often confused with copy editing, but a proofreader is not an editor. Proofreading compares the copy edited manuscript to the printer’s proof to make sure that no errors were introduced during the publishing process. They look at the formatting, end-of-line breaks, paragraph and sentence spacing, and typographical errors. They also point out misspelled words or punctuation mistakes if they find any.
The suggested rate quoted by the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) is £22.50 ($33.75) per hour. The average price per 1,000 words is £10 - £15 ($15 - $22.50).
 
Copy editing: A copy editor will check your work for spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors. They may also comment on continuity and do some minor rewriting if clarity is an issue. They don’t make significant changes or revisions.
The suggested rate quoted by the SfEP is £26.20 ($39.30) per hour. The average price per 1,000 words is £13 - £20 ($19.50 - $30).
 
Line editing: This includes all of the above and also points out things such as wordiness, overused words, repetitive sentence or paragraph structure. Line editing and copy editing have some similarities, but there is a difference. Line editing focuses more on paragraph structure, sentence flow, and word choice. They might also suggest some rewrites.
The suggested SfEP rate is £30.20 ($45.29) per hour. The average price per 1,000 is £18 - £25 ($27 - $37.49).
 
Anything over and above this is really into the realms of copywriting, which is a whole different ball game.
 
It is hard to work out how much can be achieved in an hour (10 pages?), so you may prefer to work with a price per 1,000 words or per page, which means the author can have a better idea of what the cost will be. In the copy editing world, one page equates to 250 words.
 
Ultimately you and the copy editor should feel you have a good rapport. They should always ask you for a sample of your manuscript and a word count before giving you a quote, and you should always ask them to edit a sample to see if you like the way they work.

You can find a copy of my blog in the Completely Novel newsletter. Completely Novel is a great site for those of you who are interested in self publishing.  http://completelynovel.com/articles/how-much-does-book-editing-cost#comments​ 

Oh, how I love this little symbol. If it were a key on my laptop keyboard it would get a fair bit of use. Those occasions when you type something that asks a question in an excited manner, a rhetorical question, or is a statement of disbelief in the form of a question, for instance ‘You’re pregnant?!’ … ‘It was how much?!’ - how much more satisfying it would be to be able to type an interrobang at the end.
 
An American, Martin K. Speckter, conceptualized the interrobang in 1962. He was head of an advertising agency and believed that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark rather than a question mark (interrogative point) and an exclamation mark or point (known in printers' and programmers' jargon as the "bang").
 
If you are using Microsoft Word, you can type an interrobang by switching to Wingdings 2, holding shift and typing 6^. Sadly I think the only way to use it on social media (at present) is to copy and paste a photo. 
 
For more information on this funny little symbol and its inventor check out http://www.interrobang-mks.com/

Grammar Girl (Mignon Fogarty) is a very interesting blogger who posts regularly (I pick her up from Facebook), and following on from my blog of 10 July 2015  - 'Those dreaded homophones', I would like to share this blog that she in fact also shared, which is by Neal Whitman. 

Have you ever had trouble remembering the difference between homoPHONES and homoNYMS? I have. And as if that’s not confusing enough, someone will bring up homoGRAPHS. I’m going to offer a simplified definition that will make sense to you if you’ll just agree with me on one point first: That thumbs are a kind of finger. You agree with me, right? Good!

Some etymology will help here. The root homo-, you may already realize, means “same.” It’s the same Greek root that we find in homogeneous and homosexual, but not Homo sapiens, by the way. That comes from a Latin root meaning “human.”

Homophones
First let’s tackle homophones. The root –phone means “sound,” as it does in telephone and phonics. So homophones are words that sound the same, such as doe a deer, a female deer, and dough that you bake into bread.

Homographs
Next, let’s do homographs. The root -graph means “write,” just as it does in autograph and telegraph. So homographs are words that are written the same—that is, words that have the same spelling. For example, there’s the verb tears, as in “Squiggly tears the speeding ticket in two,” and the noun tears, meaning the salty drops of water that ran down your cheek when you watched the movie Inside Out. They’re homographs because they’re both spelled T-E-A-R-S. 

Homonyms
Now we can bring in homonyms. The –onym root means “name.” You also hear it in anonymous, which literally means “without a name,” and of course, in the words synonym and antonym. Homonyms are words that have the same name; in other words, they sound the same and they’re spelled the same. For example, pen meaning the writing instrument, and pen meaning an enclosure for an animal, are homonyms. They have the same pronunciation, “pen,” and they’re both spelled P-E-N. To put it another way, homonyms are both homophones and homographs! You can even illustrate this with a cute little Venn diagram of two overlapping circles. One circle contains homophones; the other circle contains homographs; and the football in the middle contains homonyms.

So homophones sound the same; homographs are spelled the same; and homonyms do both. That’s all you need to know. 

At this point, if you already knew the difference between the three words, you might be saying, “Now hold on just one minute! Homographs are words that are spelled the same, and don’t sound the same! Homophones are words that sound the same, but aren’t spelled the same!”

This is where my fingers and thumbs analogy comes in. Sure, when somebody says, “Ow! I cut my finger!” you probably figure they cut their pointer, tall man, ring finger, or pinky. That’s because if they’d cut their thumb, they’d probably have been more specific and said, “Ow! I cut my thumb!” Even so, you agree that a thumb is a finger—a special finger, but still a finger. In the same way, it makes more sense to say that pen and pen are special homophones than to say they’re not homophones. And by the same reasoning, it’s simpler to think of pen and pen as special homographs than say they’re not homographs. 

Of course, if you really want to, you can write the definitions of homophone, homonym, and homograph so that there’s no overlap, but I suspect that definitions like that are part of the reason for people’s confusion.

That piece was by Neal Whitman who has a PhD in linguistics and blogs at literalminded.wordpress.com.
You can find Grammar Girl at quickanddirtytips.com 

I always thought Astroturf was a fake grass surface used for sports fields. Right? 

The first thing you need to work out is the difference between subjects and objects in a sentence. When you are referring to the subject of a clause you use ‘who’, and when you are referring to the object of a clause you use ‘whom’.

Still confused? Let’s try to simplify it. The subject of a sentence is the person doing something, and the object is having something done to them. Try to remember that:
I, he, she = who
Him, her = whom

If I hug Lola, then I am the subject and Lola is the object, so it would be ‘Who hugged Lola?’ because it was me, the subject, that hugged her. It would be ‘Whom did you hug?’ if you were trying to find out who it was I hugged, as you would be asking about the object - Lola.

More examples:
Who/Whom bought the cake?
He/she bought the cake. Therefore, it would be correct to say ‘Who bought the cake?’
Who/Whom should I visit?
Should I visit him/her? Therefore, it would be ‘Whom should I visit?’

Hope this makes it all a bit clearer!

Do you know how to remember when to use ‘I’ and when to use ‘me’ in a sentence? It seems a lot of people find this tricky (including our politicians), when in reality it is quite simple if you follow a rule that cuts out all the grammar jargon that scares most people (me included).

I is the first person singular subject pronoun, which means that it refers to the person performing the action of a verb, so you would say:

I fancy a piece of chocolate
not
Me fancy a piece of chocolate (unless you are a Minion - substitute banana; or the Cookie Monster - substitute cookie)

Me is an object pronoun, which means that it refers to the person that the action of a verb is being done to, or to whom a preposition refers, for instance:

She told Ellie and me to have a piece of chocolate
not
She told Ellie and I to have a piece of chocolate

The rule
The best way to work it out is to try out the sentence to see if you would use ‘me’ or ‘I’ if it were just you on your own:

Me is going out         NO
I am going out           YES

Therefore:
Charlotte and I are going out
 
He gave it to me       YES
He gave it to I            NO

Therefore:
He gave it to Charlotte and me

Not so hard after all ...

If you have any stories or comments, I’d love to hear them.

Why is it called the Oxford comma? Why not the Cambridge comma or the London comma?

The Oxford Comma, also known as the serial comma or the Harvard comma, was traditionally used by readers, printers and editors at Oxford University Press. Not all writers and publishers use it, but it can clarify the meaning of a sentence when the items in a list are not single words. It is placed immediately before the coordinating conjunction (usually and, or, or nor) when you have a series of three or more terms.

I love my parents, Eric Clapton and Carole King.
I love my parents, Eric Clapton, and Carole King. 

The first sentence, without the Oxford comma, could be misconstrued, and you might be fooled into thinking Eric Clapton and Carole King were my parents (if you were exceptionally gullible!). The second sentence, with the Oxford comma, makes it quite clear that they are three different sets of people. You could, of course, rewrite the sentence completely to read: I love Eric Clapton, Carole King and my parents. But if you are listing in order of preference, then the Oxford comma helps! 

If it doesn’t make the sentence ambiguous to miss it out, then it is purely a matter of preference.

What are your thoughts on using the Oxford comma? Do you? ... or don't you?