Month: April 2019

Coordinating Conjunctions

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From the name, you can guess that conjunctions connect things (con=with, junction=to join). There are a few different kinds of conjunctions—we will discuss Subordinating and Correlative Conjunctions in later posts. For now, let’s look at how Coordinating conjunctions connect ideas that are equal with each other (co=together with, ordinate=put in order). There are seven basic Coordinating Conjunctions in English: For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So. You can remember them by their initials: Fanboys. The things that are connected together can be as simple as a single word (noun, verb, etc.), as involved as a phrase, or as complicated as a whole clause (sentence). Why do we want to use conjunctions? To connect ideas, to establish a relationship between them.

Coordinating conjunction examples:

  • Words: “Dick and Jane ate the sweet but spicy soup.” In this example, we connect two nouns (the children) as doing the same thing together, but we also connect two adjectives (the flavours of the soup) in a contradictory manner.
  • Phrases: “The rabbit had to pick to run into the bush or down the hole, so he could escape.” Here we present two prepositional phrases as alternate options, either of which is valid. We also have a clause added on describing the result of the action.
  • Predicates: “The crook ran around the corner yet was caught by the police.” Now we have two predicates detailing the crook’s fate with an unexpected connection.
  • Clauses: “A violent gust of wind swept up the street, for it is in London that our scene lies.” Here we tie two full sentences together in an explanatory manner, attaching additional information.
  • Clauses: “The commotion did not cease, nor did it decrease in the slightest bit.” This one has two more full sentences connected in a negative sense, similar to ‘or’ but backwards.

One point to remember: if the items that are being connected are clauses (full sentences), then there needs to be a comma just before the conjunction—if not, then no comma should be there.

As you can see, using conjunctions to connect ideas improves the flow, one idea leading into another with a specific relationship.

Basic Layout of a Book (inside)

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In a previous post we delved into what is needed for the cover of a book, so now we are going to examine the inside. Besides the brilliant content you’ve created, there is the Front Matter and Back Matter, but that’s just what is there. In this post we are going to consider how it appears.

Running Headers and Footers are at the top and bottom of each page, outside your content. The Header often has the author’s name or book title on one side and the section or chapter name on the other, while the Footer has the page numbers (centered on the page, or at the outer corners—your decision on that), but it’s not a requirement to follow that pattern. The main reason they are there is so when readers are flipping through your book, they know exactly what’s being covered in each section.

Page numbers are important for reader’s to find what they need, but remember they are different for the different sections. The Front Matter has Roman numerals—the main section uses Arabic numerals. Odd numbers are on the right hand side (the recto)—even on the left (the verso). Page 1 is always the first page of content, and because chapters typically start on the right side, the left page just in front of each chapter may be blank…if it is, make certain it is entirely blank.

You want to make it easy for your readers, so pick a good, clean font. No need to be fancy here. Also make certain your line spacing is comfortable, anywhere from 1.15 to 1.25 is good enough for standard fonts. If you have a particularly tall font, it may need more, so just make the leading 5 to 10 points larger than the font size. Make certain your justification is appropriate for your content: non-fiction, fully justified; fiction, left justified. Paragraph indents and spacing also differs depending on the topic: non-fiction, no indent, minor spacing between; fiction, small indent, no spacing between. The space around your text should be considered, too. Set your margins and gutters wide enough. Especially important is avoiding widows and orphans. Both are bad—white space is good.

Obviously the content is up to you, but what you put in front of and behind your creation will be covered in another post.

Symbols sometimes used

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I say sometimes used because there are some strange ones available that will most likely never be used, but just in case, we’re going to cover them as well. Some of the more popular symbols are the copyright and trademark (and registered trademark), not used very often, but every book should have the copyright symbol on the copyright page, so it may be important to know how to put it there.

As with many things in Windows, there are a few different ways to do it. If you have AutoCorrect turned on (which you probably do unless you intentionally turned it off), you can type “(c)”, and it will ‘correct’ it to the copyright symbol. On the other hand, if you prefer to do things by yourself, you can always type Ctrl-Alt-C.

Similarly, you can get the trademark and registered trademark symbols with “(tm)” and “(r)” respectively…or Ctrl-Alt-T and Ctrl-Alt-R. Either way works fine. (For those of you who prefer mousing around, those symbols, and many others, can be found on the Insert Tab, Symbols Group, Symbol pulldown.)

Accents

A few other ‘symbols’ sometimes used are actually just accented letters, such as the ‘e’ in “café”. Again, there are a few ways to get those into your ms. I find the easiest way is to combine the accent with the regular letter by first typing the accent with Ctrl, then the letter. For example, to type “café” I would type “caf”, then hold Ctrl and type what looks like the appropriate accent mark, in this case the apostrophe, then release Ctrl and hit the letter ‘e’.

When you type the Ctrl-apostrophe, nothing appears, but when you hit the ‘e’, you get both! All you have to do is keep track of which accent mark you want. We wanted the acute accent (the one pointing up to the right) this time. If we had wanted the grave accent (pointing down…to a grave), we’d use the backtick mark (found under the tilde ‘~’ in the upper left of most keyboards).

The circumflex is found above the ‘6’, so you’d type Ctrl-Shift-6 to get that one. Putting the tilde above ‘n’ is done the same way: Ctrl-Shift-tilde (it’s above the backtick we used for the grave accent, but with Shift, we get the tilde). Also there is the cedilla…the little dangly thing hanging down below the letter ‘c’ in some words: façade for example. It sorta looks like a comma, so that’s what you’d use, typing Ctrl-comma then ‘c’. Finally, to get an umlaut (two horizontal dots over the letter), you’d use the symbol that looks like two vertical dots: the colon! Ctrl-Shift-colon followed by ‘o’ gives ‘ö’, just what you’d need if your character were a German scientist (or whatever).

As you experiment, you’ll find other key combinations that make various accented letters. Have fun and play around. You may decide that you need an international cast of characters, so you can use all those neat letters.

Basic Grammar Terms Everyone Should Know

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Again, as I dislike reading dictionaries, I will not be presenting an alphabetical list of terms, rather I’m going to go step by step from top to bottom explaining as I go. I will underline the new terms and give relevant definitions in parens. We’ll start with Grammar, which is nothing more than a set of rules dealing with syntax (how words are combined) and structure (how words are built up). For now, we’ll assume the top of the syntax pile is the sentence (largest standalone unit of grammar), which can be simple (contains one clause), compound (contains at least two independent clauses), complex (contains at least one independent AND one dependent clause), or compound-complex (contains two or more independent clauses and at least one dependent clause). Whew! What a mouthful, and we didn’t even mention relative clauses.

Clauses:

Each clause contains a subject (indicates what the clause is about) and a predicate (contains verbs, objects, and phrases used by the verb). Clauses are built up by combining phrases (small group of words). Words (combinations of sounds that communicate a meaning) consist of a single morpheme or a combination of morphemes. Morphemes (the smallest unit of meaning) are either free (can stand alone) or bound (have to be connected to another morpheme).

So we’ve now gone from largest to smallest and still haven’t covered the good stuff. Everyone likes to talk about the parts of speech, so here goes. There are two types of nouns (used to name or identify things): mass (can’t be counted) and countable (can be counted), and they have friends: pronouns (point to a nearby noun). Verbs (describe an action or state of being) have two types: transitive (needs a direct object) and intransitive (doesn’t have a direct object). Adjectives (modify a noun or a pronoun) and adverbs (modify other parts: verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs) round out the basic list. With all these parts, we can build simple sentences from individual clauses.

Combining clauses:

Now we get to the more involved sentences by combining clauses using conjunctions (connectors between words, phrases, and clauses). Three types here: coordinating (connecting two or more ideas with equal emphasis and importance), subordinating (connecting two or more ideas giving one less emphasis and lower importance), and correlative (pairs of words or phrases joining ideas equally). These are so important that we have entire posts dedicated to each: Coordinating, Subordinating, and Correlative.

Just a few more items to finish up with. Verbs have tense (indication of when action occurs), showing past, present, or future. Both Verbs and Nouns have number (marking quantity) showing singular or plural (only those two available in English!). Then there’s voice (manner of expression) with both active (actor of verb identified) and passive (actor of verb not identified, either implied or assumed).

Well, that covers just about an entire semester’s worth of instruction. If you need more info, two websites out there that I can recommend are the Online Writing Lab at Purdue and Grammar Girl.