Awkward sentence construction interferes with narrative flow in every kind of prose, from news reporting to fiction. Sometimes it’s unintentional on the part of harried or wooden-eared writers, and sometimes it’s a conscious attempt to adhere to a publication’s “house style.”
Feet, feat, and fete: English is riddled with homophones, words that are pronounced alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings. In this case: your pedal extremities, an achievement, and a celebration—all concepts so wildly divergent that it would be difficult to mistake one for the other, unless you are relying on your word processor’s spell-check function to make sure you have used the right one.
The Star Trek mission statement—“to boldly go where no one has gone before”—has been criticized many times by grammarians who insist that it’s wrong because inserting the adverb “boldly” between “to” and “go” yields a so-called “split infinitive.”
Every era has its linguistic fads. Our own is prone to borrowings from engineering and technology, or at the very least borrowings that sound technical, efficient, precise, and authoritative—even if they don’t mean much or are blatant nonsense.
You’ve landed here on the Cresting Wave website because you’re interested in writing and getting your work published. What do you want to write about? How do you want to write it? Those may seem inane questions but they are fundamental to your project.
It has been three months since bars and dine-in restaurants closed, gyms and movie theatres shuttered, and we were ordered to stay at home as much as possible.
