Miscellaneous Monday

Hope this finds you enjoying the first days of autumn! Decided to share a few links in honor of my favorite season. So here goes...

Do you have issues with productivity? Most of us do at some point, right? C.S. Lakin examines reasons why we struggle in this area and offers great insight and solutions in this post, The Life of a Super-Productive Writer.

Marketing and social media can easily overwhelm us. (Or maybe that's just me?) In 6 Key Questions to Ask Before Creating Your Social Media Strategy, the helpful folks at Add This Academy offer questions to help focus on our goals and formulate a customized plan.

Who couldn't use a little writing advice? In The Best Advice for Writers, Gary McLaren offers a great compilation of trends, tips, and links for writers of all kinds - authors, freelancers, bloggers, content  creators, etc. There's a little bit of everything here.

Congratulations to Jennifer Brown Banks of Pen and Prosper! Her blog made The Write Life's 2017 "100 Best Websites for Writers". She's in great company, and those who've visited her blog already knew she was worthy of this honor. Jennifer's topics are relevant and timely; recent posts include Friction with Your Fiction? 5 Ways to Fix It! and 4 Reasons Blog Breaks are Good for the Writer's Soul.

Do you enjoy fall? What's your favorite season? Found any good online resources lately? What's on your to-do list this week?

Happy writing,
Karen 


Photo credit: Pexels

Solving Apostrophe Issues

What trips you up when editing? I find that apostrophes with unusual circumstances can slow me down. The apostrophe's use with contractions is a given, of course, but for certain questionable instances, I use a cheat sheet. I created it for my teen writing students, and refer to it as necessary. Maybe it will be of use to you too:


General apostrophe guidelines:

• To form a plural of a letter: I got all A's and B's.
• To form a plural of a number or symbol: 6's or %'s
• When a word is discussed as a word: The sentence contains too many hey's and dude's.
• To abbreviate a year: She graduated in '07.

Special possessive situations:

Remember that the owner is the word immediately before the apostrophe. It helps to consider, is it possessive or plural, or is it possessive and singular, or possessive and plural, then follow these guidelines:

• Singular versus plural possession: the horse's trainer, the horses' trainer
  
• Compound word possessives: editor in chief's office, sister in law's birthday
• Plural compound word possessives: brothers in law's cars (more than one brother in law)
  
• For an indefinite pronoun: anyone's guess, everybody's favorite
• Individual possession: Micah's, Allie's, and Nat's books (they each own their own book)
• Shared possession: Tim, David, and Becky's book (they all own the same book)

    
And don't forget:
 

Do not use an apostrophe for possessive pronouns: its, yours, ours, his, hers, their


What grammar issues slow you down? Does anyone else cringe when they see the apostrophe misused in advertising? Or maybe that's just me...? 

How was your summer? What are you writing this week? Does it look like fall in your area? Hope you all are doing well! :)

Happy writing,

Karen 

Image credit: Pixabay