Stanzas: Monthly Chapbooks April 2015: The Fool | Page 19

Don’t Be a Fool, Obey the Rules
Stanzas’ Little Tips on Writing

T

his month, we wanted to do something a little different. Instead of a pure ‘prose’
what we have here is more of an essay, one might say. A list. A catalogue, perhaps.
Whatever it is, it’s damn well useful, you hear?
There are times when the writer can use creative licence to great effect. One’s
abilitiy to play with words, to shape them and turn them and cover them in glitter is
what separates the good writers from the great. But, creative licence is just another
word, and, unless you really know what it is you’re breaking, then you will end up
sounding silly or, worse, wrong.
Stanzas is not just about coming together as a group and supporting each others’
work, it’s also about improving your own writing. So, we had a think to ourselves, and
we came up with a little bit on the finer points of writing. Here are some handy tips,
hints and rules that you can use to improve your work. There’s nothing too major
here, but we will be focusing on some common spelling mistakes, the use of the
comma and the apostrophe, as well as some pointers on the more general DOs and
DON’Ts of writing.
Shall we start with the hard parts first? In the infamous words of our editor: Why
not?
The Comma
Ah, the humble comma, how powerful, how misunderstood, for shame, people, for
shame.
Commas are great, did you know? They are particularly great at separating items
on a list, like, when we went shopping and bought eggs, ham, cheese and a baseball
bat for classified purposes.
Commas are also great at separating clauses. Clasues are parts of a sentence
which can be picked up and moved around, for instance, check out this bad boy:
We went to the shop, using mum’s car, and bought some food to make a sandwich and a
baseball bat for classified purposes.
Using mum’s car, we went to the shop and bought some food to make a sandwich and a
baseball bat for classified purposes.
Each of these movable parts of a sentence is a clause, but be careful for if you
place your comma in the wrong space you will do something called ‘splicing’ your
sentence. And that’s nasty. Ink all over the place. Truly gruesome.
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