Grammar Guides

How to Use “Thou” Correctly Every Time

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How to Use "Thou" Correctly Every Time

Many genres, especially fantasy, make use of anachronistic language—enough so that it’s worth taking a closer look at words like thou and thee.

Anachronistic language is, simply put, a style of speech that belongs to an era other than the one in which the book is written. While it can add a new dimension to your dialogue, use it with caution—it’s easy to abuse language we don’t see often (in prose, anyway).

Knowing how this speech was used when it was extant helps us apply it to our own writing. We can then go in and spice up our dialogue with the appropriate pronouns—we just have to be sure not to go overboard.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Subjective and Objective Case Pronouns

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A Comprehensive Guide to Subjective and Objective Case Pronouns

When I was in eighth grade, my Language Arts teacher taught us how to diagram sentences. Subjective and objective case pronouns, transitive and intransitive verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs—sometimes, I thought my head would explode.

Every week, we ran through a new part of speech, until we could diagram sentences longer than even Charles Dickens would have known what to do with. Using prepositions (and not ending sentences with them like I just did), placing vocative commas, identifying the difference between direct and indirect objects—we could do all this and more at the age of thirteen. Generations before me could probably do it a lot younger. Hopefully, they continue to teach the generations after mine how to do it, too.

Cruel and unusual for a bunch of kids? Maybe. But it also made me appreciate how words fit together. After all, when you know how to use words properly, you know how to abuse them better.

And that’s when writing gets fun.

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The Ultimate Breakdown of (Semi)Colons to Help You Become an Expert

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The Ultimate Breakdown of (Semi)Colons to Help You Become an Expert

In any kind of writing (especially prose), sentence flow is extremely important when it comes to keeping your audience engaged. Too many short, choppy sentences in a row leave the writing feeling too simplistic, while too many long, flowing sentences may leave the reader feeling bored or confused. It becomes necessary to vary the pace, to keep the reader on their toes. That’s where punctuation comes in.

Punctuation is the key to controlling how your audience reads the sentences you write. Periods are, of course, a full stop. Exclamation points and question marks have their uses as well, providing interesting shifts in tone when used appropriately. Commas connect thoughts or separate items in a list, although they can become… muddy. 

With too many commas, your writing turns into the circuitous prose of an eccentric 18th-century novelist. However, not adding pauses to your work will make your writing seem stiff. So how do you break up your sentences to maintain the proper pacing?

COLON and SEMICOLON enter stage left. 

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