3259 readersI’d like to talk about a few commonly confused words today. The usage rules for one of them had me so confused I simply stopped using the word for several years. Only recently did I realize it’s hard to go wrong when you use the word.
The words in question?
COMPOSE and COMPRISE
What tripped me up about
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6648 readersCompose and comprise seem like mischievous brothers who are opposites but masquerade as each other to fool their friends. They’re very similar — both handle parts-to-whole relationships — yet they’re mirror images in how they handle it.
The standard division is this. Compose has the parts as the subject and the whole as the object.
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1133 readersI have a confession to make. I’ve been doing it wrong all these years.
Throughout my long editing career, I have corrected writers who erroneously use the word comprise, as in “The federal government is comprised of the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches.”
Original Post: I Just Got Wise to “Comprise”
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7092 readers
The English language is such a beautiful thing, isn’t it? That is not to say that it is always simple. In fact, even native speakers make mistakes now and then. Even professional writers have their Waterloo.
The good thing is that as long as we are open to correction and learning, we can only become
2784 readersImage via Wikipedia Thinking about starting a new Wikipedia article for yourself or your business – but you just don’t know where to start? As we’ve mentioned before, not every article idea or subject is appropriate for Wikipedia (go here for a few pointers). So your first step is to determine if your personal/business/product/other Wikipedia
2963 readersby Todd RutherfordWriting an entire novel or non fiction book may on the surface seem to be impossible. However, if you break up your tasks the right way, it is completely possible to finish a book quickly. The average full length book can range anywhe...
3920 readersStumbling upon This Recording was like hitting the virtual jackpot—articles and critiques of literature, film, art, television, fashion, and architecture; science, space, and technology sections; poems and songs and video clips; a “Pleasure” section comprised of articles and news relating to sex, sports, food, and comedy, and a wealth of other material sure to [READ
3152 readersYou did it—you finished a manuscript by the end of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, but it falls short of your goal of 50,000 words. This often happens: novelists find themselves typing “The End,” only to realize their word count is too short. Here are some tips for adding additional pages to your novel without
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4684 readersWe spelled the word "indispensable" correctly 161 times in the last year. Unfortunately, we spelled it incorrectly, as "indispensible," 17 times, an error rate of nearly 10 percent.
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90 readersWe spelled the word "indispensable" correctly 161 times in the last year. Unfortunately, we spelled it incorrectly, as "indispensible," 17 times, an error rate of nearly 10 percent.