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By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 6/13/2014
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When revising, it is important to look at each sentence for subject-verb agreement. This is one of those skills that comes naturally over time.
There are a few tricky circumstances to double check.
1) A singular subject requires a singular verb. A plural subject requires a plural verb with a few exceptions.
I sing. You sing. We all sing for ice cream.
The little girls all sang for their supper.
2) If the subject has two singular nouns joined with and use a plural verb.
Dick and Jane are ready to go home.
3) If the subject has two singular nouns joined with or or nor, use a singular verb.
Neither Dick nor Jane is ready to go home.
4) If the subject has a singular noun joined to a plural noun by or or nor, the verb should agree with whichever noun comes last.
Neither Dick nor his friends want to play catch outside.
Either Sally or Jane visits everyday.
5) The contractions doesn't (does not) and wasn't (was not) are always used with a singular subject.
Dick doesn’t want to go.
6) The contractions don't (do not) and weren't (were not) are always used with a plural subject. The exception to this rule is I and you require don't.
We don’t want to go with Jane.
You don’t believe me.
I don’t want to go home yet.
7) When a modifying phrase comes between the subject and the verb, it does not change the agreement. The verb always agrees with the subject, not the modifying phrase.
Dick, as well as his friends, hopes the Colts win.
Jane, as well as Sally and Dick, hopes the meeting will be over soon.
8) Distributives are singular and need a singular verb: anybody, anyone, each, each one, either, everybody, everyone, neither, no, one, nobody, somebody, someone.
Each of them will go there someday.
Nobody knows Dick is here.
Either way works.
Neither option is viable.
9) Plural nouns functioning as a single unit, such as mathematics, measles, and mumps, require singular verbs. An exception is the word dollars. When used to reference an amount of money, dollars requires a singular verb; but when referring to the bills themselves, a plural verb is required.
Five thousand dollars would suffice.
Dollars are easier to exchange than Euros.
10) Another exception is nouns with two parts. They can usually be prefaced with a pair of and require a plural verb: glasses, pants, panties, scissors, or trousers. Why they are considered pairs is another question.
Dick's trousers are worn.
Jane's scissors are missing.
11) When a sentence begins with the verb phrases there is and there are and they are followed by the subject, the verb must agree with the subject that follows.
There are many who would agree with you.
There is the question of who goes first.
12) A subject can be modified by a phrase that begins with: accompanied by, as well as, as with, in addition to, including, or together with. However, this does not modify the plurality of the subject. If the subject is single, it requires a singular verb. If the subject is plural, it requires a plural verb.
Dick, accompanied by his wife Jane, will arrive in ten minutes.
Everything, including the kitchen sink, is up for auction.
The cousins, together with their dog, are going to be here for a week.
Revision Tips
? This step needs to be done sentence by sentence and is best done on a printed copy. Identify the complicated sentences.
? Underline the subject and verb. Do they agree? If not, correct them.
? Make sure the modifying phrases are used correctly.
For all of the revision tips on verbs and other revision layers, pick up a copy of:
Most bloggers display their latest posts first — reverse chronological order is the classic blog format, after all. Many WordPress.com users, however, choose to build a static front page — a homepage — that creates a website feel and brings your long-term content to the front.
A well-designed homepage has always been a staple of major websites, like The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation — a WordPress.com VIP partner. You don’t have to be a large company or non-profit organization to see the advantages of a homepage, though. Artists and other creative professionals enjoy the benefits of portfolio sites and personal pages to showcase their talents. Increasingly, so do personal bloggers across a wide variety of niches. To give you a taste of what a homepage can do for your blog, here are some sites that use this option in a smart, creative way.
Claire, the Seoul-based kindergarten teacher behind Groovy Bow Sequence, put together a sleek-looking homepage for her travel-focused personal blog.
She uses Moka to great effect. The theme offers the option of adding a splashy post slider to the homepage, enticing visitors to click on Claire’s striking landscape images and read her posts, while still maintaining the easy navigation and streamlined look of a fixed front page. While sites with a homepage often still feature a blog section, Claire has opted to forego one altogether, presenting some recent posts on the homepage itself, and letting the rest be easily accessible through the sidebar menu.
Writer-blogger Alexandra Corinth deploys a homepage — and especially her site’s primary menu — to direct readers to her various writing projects, from her young-adult books, to her multi-genre portfolio, to her personal blog.
She chose the clean, easy-to-navigate Suits, and kept most of the theme’s out-of-the-box look. The focus here is on her content, and her homepage is a distraction-free zone — visitors will only find an author’s portrait, along with a short bio tucked into a Text Widget in the sidebar. They can then quickly decide which section of the site to explore first.
Dan, the blogger behind redstuffdan, is a retired expat living in the southwest of France. His blog is mostly about his art — a mixture of photography, digital art, and painting — and he’s opted for a homepage to showcase his creations. Right beneath a short introductory text to his site, visitors quickly plunge into a colorful tiled gallery full of Dan’s art. The gallery’s composition can be modified whenever new material is uploaded — just because the page is “static” doesn’t mean it can’t be updated and refreshed.
For the rest of the content on redstuffdan, the sidebar gives visitors easy access to the site’s top posts and pages, most recent posts, as well as to older content through monthly archives.
Up From The Deep is the labor of love of Mark Ellinger, a musician-turned-photographer who chronicles the gentrifying streets of San Francisco’s grittiest neighborhoods. Creating a homepage allowed him to highlight the different types of writing on his site: a blog to which he uploads new photos regularly, as well as long-term project pages, like the ones on the Tenderloin and Mid-Market neighborhoods.
The homepage layout features a selection of images that whet the visitor’s appetite, and its primary menu leads not only to the site’s main content, but also to an extensive bibliography page and a Prints page, where interested readers can order copies of images from Mark’s website.
Creating a homepage
If you’d like to try out a front page that isn’t populated by your latest posts, setting one up is a breeze. Go to the Settings → Reading tab in your dashboard, and select “a static page.” Then, choose your desired page from the “Front page” drop menu, and you’re set. If you wish to add an optional blog section to your site as well — where your posts will be displayed in reverse chronological order — specify a separate “Posts page” in the second drop menu. Note that you can also set up a homepage from the Customizer, where you’ll need to go to the “Front” panel.
Looking for more ideas for your homepage? Here are a few more examples to inspire you:
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By:
Liz Carmichael,
on 9/27/2013
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As we discussed in the first installment of Digging in the Dashboard, WordPress.com has so many great features that it’s tough to be familiar with them all. I’m still discovering new ones myself! Let’s keep the discovery going with three more features that might be new to you. This time, …
By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 9/13/2013
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Game On! Creating Character Conflict
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For the next few weeks, we are going to dissect The Crooked House by Agatha Christie.
The first layer we're going to examine is her use of theme. In The Crooked House, Christie used a children's rhyme to illustrate the bent and twisted nature of the family involved in the murder.
The following excerpts illustrate her use of the theme throughout the story.
Chapter 1
She added softly in a musing voice: “In a little crooked house …”
I must have looked slightly startled, for she seemed amused and explained by elaborating the quotation. “'And they all lived together in a crooked little house.' That’s us. Not really such a little house either. But definitely crooked – running to gables and half timbering!”
Chapter 3
I suddenly remembered the whole verse of the nursery rhyme:
There was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence beside a crooked stile.
He had a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
I wondered why it had been called Three Gables. Eleven gables would have been more apposite! The curious thing was that it had a strange air of being distorted – and I thought I knew why. It was the type, really, of a cottage, it was a cottage swollen out of all proportion. It was like looking at a country cottage through a gigantic magnifying-glass. The slant-wise beams, the half-timbering, the gables – it was a little crooked house that had grown like a mushroom in the night.
Chapter 8
This was the Original Crooked Little Man who had built the Crooked Little House – and without him the Crooked Little House had lost its meaning.
Chapter 13
I went down to the Crooked House (as I called it in my own mind) with a slightly guilty feeling.
Chapter 15
“I think that’s what I mean when I said we all lived together in a crooked little house. I didn’t mean that it was crooked in the dishonest sense. I think what I meant was that we hadn’t been able to grow up independent, standing by ourselves, upright. We’re all a bit twisted and twining (…) like bindweed."
Chapter 17
“He was a natural twister. He liked, if I may put it so, doing things the crooked way.”
Chapter 26
“We will go there together and you will forget the little Crooked House.”
Throughout the solving of the murder, the evidence twists and turns and reveals the way the family members are intertwined in an unhealthy way. The young widow is often described as resembling a cat.
Christie sprinkled the theme in with a delicate hand. The analogy is referred to in only seven of the twenty-six chapters. The idea of crookedness inspires the whole.
To address theme, I suggest considering at the beginning or end of the first draft what you want the story to say. Then, as you go through the revision layers, develop your theme through description and dialogue.
You might find a nursery rhyme to fit your purpose.
Next week, we will take a look at how Christie uses description to introduce characters.
By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 9/6/2013
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Just as a film director scouts locations for his film, you can scout locations for your book. Whether you are an organic, planner, or hybrid writer, your scenes will be set somewhere.
When you are planning or writing your novel, it helps to have visual images to look at when describing your scenes. You may have chosen a gritty urban streetscape, a desert SciFi terrain, a remote manor house in the Scottish Highlands, or a sheep farm down under. If you are lucky enough to be able to travel to the place and truly absorb the sights, smells, and sounds, you are ahead of the game.
If not, the beautiful thing about the internet age is you don’t have to leave your house to research them. There are travel channels and brochures, DVDs, and movies set in specific locales for you to investigate. It won’t give you the smells, sounds, and tastes, but it is better than making it up entirely in your head.
Thanks to Google Maps and other satellite mapping programs, you can now zoom in and do a 360-degree pan of the area. While it doesn’t allow you to peek inside the windows, you can stroll through a neighborhood in Paris, London, or Peoria for free.
For interior scenes, you can find images through internet search engines. You can find examples of log cabins, Victorian parlors, industrial warehouses, and suburban homes. Tourist sites and real estate sites offer visual tours.
For my current project I needed a Victorian stage and the exterior and interior of a Victorian manor house. Some tours of stately homes offered floor plans. I will create a fictional manor house utilizing the rich details I discovered.
By zooming along England’s coast I found the town of Graves End. Perfect location name for a mystery and close enough to London that my investigators could easily go there by coach. A little more digging and I found it was on the coach line and had people arriving from London several times a day. Of course, Google maps shows a very modern Graves End, but I did find an early map of it as well as illustrations.
Sadly, I cannot afford to go to Graves End and I’d need the Tardis to return to Victorian times. I’ll have to settle for imagining the way it smells and sounds and the way it might have been. But if I hadn’t been scouting for locations, I would never have known it was there.
By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 4/19/2013
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As I watched yet another body count trend upward in a recent movie, it inspired me to list the top five things that bore me as a viewer/reader. These clichéd and overused tropes are supposed to wow, but leave me snoring. This list applies to fiction as well as movies.
1) Gratuitous sex scenes, aka sex with a stranger.
It’s stupid. Why should I care? The encounter between two people who truly long for each other, who have been kept apart then finally come together, is far more intriguing. Couples who have a history that reunite or make up are more interesting than random rutters.
2) Random violence.
Killing one character I've grown invested in is more compelling than blasting away with an automatic weapon downing characters I don’t know or care about. It's a fact of human nature that genocide in a distant land doesn't register until the battle is brought to a person's front door. The closer the character who dies is to the protagonist, the higher the story stakes. As much as I love cozy mysteries, there's almost a disconnect when it comes to the victims. The best cozy mystery makes me care that the victim died.
3) Gore.
It’s a turn off. As much as I appreciate special effects makeup artists, they can use their talents to make cooler effects that don’t involve rolling heads or spurting arteries. In books, I really don’t need paragraphs of gruesome details. I scan past them. Same with torture and battle scenes. They make me cringe. I'm a grown-up. I have experienced loss and pain. I get the drift. The reality that people are bestial and kill each other is disgusting and horrifying enough. We never followed Anne Frank to the concentration camp, but the reality of the horror of that story scarred me for life. Why? Because I grew to know and like her and that made what she went through personal rather than abstract. If you want to impress upon your readers true horror, make it personal.
4) Drawn out panoramic shots.
Whether it’s a prolonged movie clip or endless paragraphs describing the setting in excessive detail, I have a tendency to fast forward or skim read past them. Take a picture; it lasts longer. Have you ever sat through an endless slideshow of someone else's vacation? Make description short and make it count, then move onto the point of the scene. It's even better if the setting has an impact on the scene.
5) Adults or teens that behave like out of control toddlers.
Book or movie, I have no patience with these characters. I wouldn't hang out with them in person. I don't waste page time with them either. If this character is the protagonist, I put the book down and it goes on my discard pile.
What tropes inspire you to flip pages or quit reading?
A simple way to add visual variety to your site’s front page is to publish your content using Post Formats. Over 50 of our themes support Post Formats, which means they can display various types of content — including images, videos, quotes, links, audio, and short snippets called “asides” — with different formatting, adding subtle but nice touches to your site.
The types of Post Formats you can choose from depends on your theme. To see what Post Formats your current theme supports, go to Posts » Add New in the dashboard and look for a Format module on the right, with various options like the one below:
Using Post Formats is optional — if your theme supports them, you don’t have to use them, since the default (standard) format works well with any content you publish. Using Post Formats is also free: you don’t need to purchase the custom CSS upgrade to enable different Post Formats.
Our Top Themes Now Support Post Formats
Recently, we made our top 25 themes — from popular free themes like Pilcrow, Manifest, and Bueno to premium themes such as Elemin — look even better with Post Formats. Here’s a sampling of how Post Formats look different, using the Elemin theme as an example:
Image Format:
Video Format:
Quote Format:
Link Format:
Audio Format:
Aside Format:
Graphic icons spice up this particular theme, while other themes have different design or textual elements appropriate for their layouts. Browse the themes that support Post Formats in our Theme Showcase.
Start Posting Now
You can publish instantly using popular Post Formats right in your dashboard. Just click on “New Post” on the top right, then select one of these popular formats to publish instantly to one of your sites:
Alternatively, you can go to Posts » Add New in your dashboard to create a new post. Just select the appropriate Post Format in the Format module, and you can use the “Preview” button to view the post before publishing it.
By:
Liz Carmichael,
on 12/17/2012
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We’re excited to announce more updates to the Media Manager, which makes it even easier to upload and manage media on your site.
Insert a Slideshow in the Media Manager
You can now enable a slideshow in the Media Manager. In Edit Gallery mode, you’ll see a list of options on the right under “Gallery Settings.” Click on the dropdown menu next to “Type” to see a new list of gallery types, including a Slideshow option at the bottom:
Similar to the gallery feature, the slideshow option allows you to include specific images. You can reorder the images by dragging and dropping thumbnails, randomize the order by checkmarking the box next to “Random Order,” and reverse the order of images by clicking the “Reverse Order” button at the top. You can also insert multiple slideshows into a post or page, just as you’re able to do with galleries.
Note that the “Link To” and “Columns” options do not apply to slideshows.
The old [slideshow] shortcode will continue to work, but to access all these new features — such as ordering, excluding certain images, etc. — you would need to update your shortcode to use the new [gallery type="slideshow"] format.
Select Gallery Layouts Easily
You’ll also notice you can now set the type of gallery in the Media Manager, in the same dropdown menu mentioned above. In addition to Slideshow, you’ll see a list of gallery layout options: Default, Tiles, Square Tiles, and Circles. Note that Tiles is the option for the rectangular layout, and Square Tiles is the option for the square layout. (As mentioned in our recent galleries post, the thumbnail grid layout is the default option for all sites.)
Using the various gallery shortcodes to display your galleries still works as well.
These latest updates make it even easier for you to manage your media — all in one place! For further information, please visit our slideshow and gallery support pages.
David Lee King and I rarely cross paths, but it’s always great to get to see him speak. Over the past month he’s been creating a really good set of posts called 10 Tips to Do Presentations Like Me. Each post has a headline and an explanation of why that thing is a good way to do presentations. Of course everyone has their own way of doing things, but it’s nice to see someone who has an effective and engaging presentation style really taking the time to outline just what they’re doing that’s working. It’s not magic, it’s hard work and some attention to detail.
You can make your own fancy-pants book scanners from trash and cheap cameras, instructables shows you how in just 79 easy steps! [thanks nick]
How to commission artwork so you can create a memorable brand.
“Oh Jessamyn, you are such a fashion plate, I am sure you must know how to make some of those styling book earrings that every hip librarian is wearing lately, don’t you?”
“Well no, but a wiki can show you how.”
By:
Kate Messner,
on 8/15/2007
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I know it's early, but I want to let everyone know about the Burlington Book Festival coming up next month. Burlington, VT hosts an incredible book festival each fall, just as the leaves are changing color in New England. If you live in the Northeast (or even if you don't but you really, really like autumn leaves and books), it's worth the trip. Most of the events are being held at Waterfront Theater on the shores of Lake Champlain.
I'll be presenting on Sunday, September 16th at the Children's Literature Festival. Here's my blurb from the festival website:
11:00 AM-12:00 PM
KATE MESSNER
Join Kate Messner for a trip back in time to the American Revolution on Lake Champlain. Kate will read from her middle grade historical novel Spitfire, set during the Battle of Valcour Island in 1776, sign books and present an interactive multimedia slide show about the real 12-year-old who fought in the battle. Kids will be invited to taste the food and try on the clothes of an 18th century sailor, handle artifact replicas and design their own powder horns to take home.
Waterfront Theatre Black Box, 3rd Floor
Right after my presentation, Linda Urban (![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
lurban) will read from A CROOKED KIND OF PERFECT and talk about the journey of writing and publishing a children's book. (Even though Linda says it will make her nervous, my kids and I are definitely going to be in the audience!)
Also on tap for the Sunday kids' day... Tracey Campbell Pearson, James Kochalka, Anna Dewdney, Harry Bliss, Jim Arnosky, Barbara Seuling, Marie-Louise Gay, Barbara Lehman, and Warren Kimble.
And the rest of the Book Festival is nothing to scoff at either, with writers like Chris Bohjalian, Howard Frank Mosher, Russell Banks, and Joyce Carol Oates speaking on Saturday, September 15th. The full schedule is posted at the festival website now. If you're in the area that weekend, please stop by the Children's Literature Festival and say hello!
I recently switched to the Suits theme and I really like it. Maybe I’ll try a static front page again… I used to have one.
This is good to know to help with my blog. Good tips!
Wonderful advice, thank you!
Thanks very much for highlighting my homepage. What a nice surprise!
This is an interesting concept…
Bobby
This post came at a perfect time! I’m designing a home page soon and this has given me great ideas. Thank you!
I am going to ponder this. It will be a while before I could do anything anyhow, but an interesting idea for positive change.
This is really great, very helpful. Some excellent advice.
Yes…some very good info here…
I’ll have to keep these tips in mind when it’s time for a re-design.
I think I do have a bit of a Homepage going already…what do you think?
I needed this. Thanks!