Past & Passed

Once upon a time I had a problem with these two words. Found this one on the web, thought I'd share it with you.

Past – relates to location

The word past locates something in time, and sometimes in space. It can be used as an adjective, noun, or adverb.
“Past” as an adjective
The first definition which the OED gives for past as an adjective is “Gone by in time; elapsed; done with; over.” For example: “The days for mourning are now past.”
When attributed to a group of people, past can also mean “Having served one’s term of office; former.” (OED)

• “All past presidents of the United States were male.”

And in grammar, we have more examples of past being used as an adjective, such as in “past tense” and “past participle”.
“Past” as a noun
The main meaning for the noun form of past, given by the OED, is “The time that has gone by; a time, or all of the time, before the present.”

• “In the past, standards were higher.”
• “We cannot live in the past.”

“Past” as a preposition
As a preposition, past can mean: “Beyond in time; after; beyond the age for or time of; (in stating the time of day) so many minutes, or a quarter or half of an hour, after a particular hour.” (OED)

• “It is almost half past five.”

It can also be used for location: “Beyond in place; further on than; at or on the further side of; to a point beyond.” (OED)

• “My house is the one just past the turning.”

“Past” as an adverb
The first meaning the OED cites for past being used as an adverb is “So as to pass or go by; by.” For example:

• “The ball sped past the goalkeeper.”

Passed – a verb in the past tense

Passed is the past participle of the verb “to pass”. It can be an intransitive verb (one which doesn’t require an object) or a transitive verb (one which requires both a subject and one or more objects).
“To pass” means “To proceed, move forward, depart; to cause to do this.” (OED) This can refer to movement forwards in time, in space, or in life (such as “to pass an examination”).
For example:

• “The weeks passed quickly.” (Intransitive: subject “the weeks” and no object).
• “I passed all my exams!” (Transitive: subject “I” and object “my exams”.)
• “He passed the ball well during the match earlier.” (Transitive: subject “He” and object “the ball”.)

When do “past” and “passed” get confused?

Often, writers muddle the words past and passed in sentences such as:

• “The heroes passed a village on their way towards the mountains.”

It’s common to see this written as:

• “The heroes past a village on their way towards the mountains.”

But the word should be passed, as (in this sentence) it’s the past participle of the verb “to pass”. An easy way to tell is to rewrite the sentence in the present tense, as though you’re describing something which is happening currently:

• “The heroes pass a village on their way towards the mountains.”
• or “The heroes are passing a village on their way towards the mountains.”

However, if you wrote:

• “The heroes walked past a village on their way towards the mountains.”

It’s correct to use past. The verb in this sentence is “walked”, and the “past” is acting as an adverb.

Unusual uses of the word “passed”

Most of the time, passed is a verb, as described above. There are a few occasions when it can be used as a noun or an adjective, though. For example:

• “Don’t speak ill of the passed.” (noun)
  - This comes from the phrase “passed-away”.
• “A passed pawn” (adjective)
  - Term used in chess.
• “A passed ball” (adjective)
  - Term used in baseball.
• “A passed midshipman/fireman/surgeon” (adjective)
  - Someone who has passed a period of instruction and qualified through examination – apparently this usage arose in the navy.

Have you come across any other unusual uses? Are there still any cases where you’re not sure whether to use passed or past? Share your examples with us in the comments below!

Show, Don't Tell

Speech and Thought Through Personality .

The fiction-writing dictum for both publisher & editor is, “Show, don’t tell.”
How do you apply that in practical terms when it comes to communicating characterization without exposition?

People in different eras have unique speech and speech patterns, but restrain yourself from indulging in periodization in your historical novel; if your Elizabethan-era characters talk like Shakespeare’s, people:
1) won’t understand much of what they say and
2) will be distracted by your forced — and fatally flawed — attempt at authenticity.

Do immerse yourself in that period’s society: What did people know about history and sociology and psychology and spirituality (even if they never used those terms to identify them)? What were prevailing political and social and religious viewpoints? How open were the people of then day, about expressing themselves? Do not to let modern sensibilities intrude on the way your characters speak and think. Do, however, permit them and their speeches and thoughts to be accessible to modern readers.

The extent to which characters will express their ideas and opinions, or ruminate about them, and the language with which they will do so, depends on a few other factors:
People of different generations and different social backgrounds generally speak differently. Geriatric characters should exhibit speech and speech patterns distinct from juvenile ones and consistent with norms unless an exception is a deliberate dramatic point — for instance, if a teenager who has switched bodies with an elderly person is trying to pass vocally as well as visually as a senior citizen.

Likewise, the speech and thoughts of well-educated characters will usually be distinguishable from that of those of others with less formal schooling. Of course, no one should assume that a person with only a high school education is less intelligent than a college graduate, or the reverse, but their vocabulary and the level of sophistication of their thoughts will, unless they are self-educated, likely differ.

Further individualization of characters makes fiction writing more vivid. How does one’s personality affect words and thoughts? A repressed person’s speech patterns will differ significantly from an extrovert’s. A tense, angry character will exhibit different rhythms of speech and thought than a carefree individual.

Length of speeches and thoughts is also a consideration: Philosophically minded people do not tend to make snap judgments. Children do not soliloquize. Match the extent to which people speak and think to their personalities. Keep in mind that various sentence lengths and paragraph lengths have differing dramatic values, too — long passages tend to be soothing (but, when too long, are sleep-inducing), while short bursts create or maintain tension (though,done to excess, can be as wearying as extensive paragraphs).

In essence, capitalize on your knowledge of individual characters to establish vocabulary and modes of speech and thought, as well as on familiarity with societal norms for speaking and thinking appropriate to the era in which your characters live.

Writing Prompts

Writing Prompts, what are they?

If you’re a fiction writer, you may want to consider the use writing prompts to kick-start your creativity. A writing prompt is a topic around which you start jotting down ideas. The prompt can be a single word, a short phrase, a complete paragraph or even a picture. The idea being, to give you something to focus upon while you write. You may stick closely to the original prompt or you may, as many do, wander off at a tangent.
The point is to start writing, without being held back by inhibitions or doubts. Your first notes will be rough, disjointed, but the more you refine your idea the closer you’ll to something polished and complete. Maybe a scene or even a complete story.

Here are four good reasons for writing to prompts:

1.When faced with a blank page, many times it’s hard to start writing. Focusing on your unrelated prompt for a while, helps get the creative juices flowing. Writing for  for just ten minutes on a prompt, you should find it easier to return to the piece you intended to write. You may also find that if you stop trying to think so hard about what you wanted to write and switch you attention to the prompt instead, the words and ideas for your original piece start to come to you after all.

2.The things you write, responding to inspiration of your chosen prompt may end up as worthwhile material in their own right. Your prompt may give you ideas from which a complete story can grow. You may get a fresh idea for another piece you’re already working on. It’s often surprising how much material you come up with once you get started.

3.Working to a prompt regularly, helps to get you into the habit of writing. It can act as an exercise regime, helping to build up your “mental muscles” so that you start to find your writing sessions get longer and longer, while the effort gets easier.

4.Prompts can be a great way to get involved in a writing community. Some writing groups offer a prompt for everyone to write about, with the intention being for everyone to come up with something they can then share. The leader of one such group handed out a 3 x 5 card. Each member wrote down two nouns, two verbs, two adjectives, and one color. The twist to the exercise came when we passed the cards two places to the left. The card we received, became the basis of a 300-500 word piece. This can be a source of great encouragement, although knowing others will read what you have written can inhibit your creativity.


Examples of Writing Prompts

Here are twenty writing prompts that you could use to spark your imagination. If you want to use one, don’t worry about where the ideas take you or whether what you’ve written is “good”. The point is just to get into the flow of writing. You can come back later and polish if you wish to.
 01. It was the first hard snowfall of the year.
 02. She woke, shivering, in the dark of the night.
 03. His feet were already numb. He should have listened.
 04. Silk lace.
 05. She studied her swollen face in the mirror.
 06. Red eyes.
 07. This time her boss had gone too far.
 08. She’d have to hitch a ride home.
 09. The streets are deserted. Where is everyone? Where had they all gone?
 10. The city burned, fire lighting up the night sky
 11. They came back every year to lay flowers on the side of the road.
 12. Stars blazed in the night sky.
 13. He woke to the song of birds in the meadow.
 14. The garden was overgrown now.
 15. The smell of freshly-cut grass.
 16. He hadn’t seen her since the day they left High School
 17. ‘Shh! Hear that?’ ‘I didn’t hear anything.’
 18. He’d never noticed a door there before.
 19. Where does this corridor led?
 20. ‘I told her not to go there!’
 21. He’d always hated speaking in public.

Where To Find Writing Prompts Online.
The internet is a wonderful source of writing prompts. There are sites dedicated to providing them which a quick search will turn up. Examples include:

 •Creative-Writing-Solutions.com
 •WritersDigest.com
 •CreativeWritingPrompts.com

I also came across numerous blogs offering a regular writing prompt to inspire you and where you can, if you wish, post what you’ve written.

 •DragonWritingPrompts.blogspot.com
 •OneMinuteWriter.blogspot.com
 •SundayScribblings.blogspot.com


There are also many other sites that can, inadvertently, provide a rich seam of material for writing prompts – for example news sites with their intriguing headlines or pictorial sites such as Flickr.com that give you access to a vast range of photographs that can prompt your writing.
Have a Twitter account, there are users you can follow and receive a stream of prompts Three examples:
 •twitter.com/writingprompt
 •twitter.com/NoTelling
 •twitter.com/writingink

Another idea is just to keep an eye on all the tweets being written by people all over the world, some of which can, inadvertently, be used as writing prompts.

How To Make Your Own Writing Prompts

You can find ideas for writing prompts of your own from all sorts of places. Get used to keeping your eyes open for words and phrases that fire your imagination. Sometimes snatches of overheard conversation, headlines, signs, words picked from a book and so on. Jot them down any and all, then use them as writing prompts to spark your creativity. You never know what road they may take you down..

Seven useful websites writers

From grammar guides to usage resources. From usual suspects to obscure gems, here are seven web sites writers of all genres will find of great value:

1. Amazon.com
You may have heard of this website — a good place, I understand, to find books (or anything else manufactured). But what I appreciate even more is the “Search inside this book” link under the image of the book cover on most pages in the Books section. No longer do you need to own a book, drive out to the bookstore, or thumb through it at library in search of a name, that clever remark or expression you can’t quite remember. And even if you do have access to the book in question, it’s easier to search online than to try to remember on what part of what page in what part of the book you remember seeing something last week or last month or years ago. The book search can be a writer’s salvation.
 
2. The Chicago Manual of Style Online
A review on this site, The Chicago Manual of Style, notes that despite its abundance of useful information, buying the bulky book is overkill for writers (but it is an editors best friend). Editorial professionals of all kinds will benefit from the CMOS, Style Q&A feature, which responds authoritatively, sensibly, and often humorously to visitors’ queries.

3. Banned for Life
Newspaper editor Tom Mangan’s site lists reader contributions of clichés and redundancies.
4. GrammarBook.com
Jane Straus, (May 1954 - Feb 2011) author of The Blue Book on Grammar and Punctuation, created this site to promote her book. It also features simple grammar lessons (and quizzes), as well as video lessons, an e-newsletter, and blog entries that discuss various grammar topics.

5. The Word Detective
Words and Language in a Humorous Vein on the Web Since 1995
 This online version of Evan Morris’s newspaper column of the same name (some were also published in the book The Word Detective) features humorous Q&A entries about word origins.

6. The Phrase Finder
A useful way to find proverbs, phrases from the Bible and Shakespeare, nautical expressions, and American idiom (the site originates in the United Kingdom), plus a feature called “Famous Last Words” and, for about $50 a year, subscription to a phrase thesaurus. (Subscribers include many well-known media companies and other businesses as well as universities.)

7. The Vocabula Review
The Principal Web Destination for Anyone Interested in Words and Language
 Essays about language and usage; $25 per year by email, $35 for the print version.

Grammatical Errors That Aren’t

Just finished running my manuscript through the WordPerfect Grammatik. I ran into so frustrating, if not down right maddening rules that drove me crazy. Rules that can, in dialogue screw up you character’s way off speaking, if you adhere to them, Here are seven I found and I will ignore.

There are two types of grammar: Prescriptive grammar, which prescribes what should be, and descriptive, which describes what is customary. Tension between the two systems is
foreseeable and healthy; it keeps us thinking about what we’re writing and how we're saying it.

Allowing mob rule at the expense of some governing of composition is madness, but articulate  absolutism is dangerous, also. As with any prescription, overdosing is contraindicated. Here are seven hard pills to swallow for the language storm troopers who insist on a strict attachment to rigid syntactic patterns at the expense of, well for lack of a better word, language:

1. Never begin a sentence with a conjunction. WHAT! WHY!
And why not? For an honorable tradition of doing just that exists. But many people persist in prohibiting this technique. Yet as writers defy them. Or we ignore or laugh at them, neither of which they appreciate. Nor do they understand our attitude, though we try to convince them, and will continue to do so. So there.

The words beginning each of these sentences are conjunctions, easily recalled with the mnemonic FANBOYS. Every one is perfectly acceptable at the head of a sentence. As is obvious from the previous paragraph, however, a little goes a long way.

In case you don’t know,

For
And
Nor
But
Or
Yet
So
  
2. Distinguish between, While and Though
Petty prescriptivists would have us reserve while for temporal usage only: "While I agree, I resist," they say, should be revised to "Though I do agree, I resist." I will admit I often change while to though, and while I understand, I’m sorry, I can not stop myself , and though I understand that it may seem bookish, but I think though reads better.

3. Use Data only in the plural sense. (Huh!)
Who came up with this data? The alternative is to use the word datum in the singular sense, which makes you sound like a propeller head. (Look it up, kids.) People who say "datum" get data, but they don’t get dates.

4. Never split an infinitive.
It isn’t wise to always ignore this fallacious rule against dividing the elements of the verb phrase "to (verb)" with an adverb, but to blindly follow it is to prohibit pleasing turns of phrase — one of the best known of which is from the introductory voice-over from all the Star Trek television series: "to boldly go where no one has gone before." (The original series, produced before the more recent sensitivity to gender bias, put it "no man.")

5. Use none only in the singular sense. (What!)
None of these rules, followed strictly, allow for a vernacular ease with language.

Did Earth stop spinning? Did that sentence hurt? Did the waves stop crashing to shore? If you Want to replace none with "not one" or "no one" ("Not one person admitted guilt"; "No one saw that coming"), by all means, do so, but fear not none in a plural sense.
　

　

7. Distinguish between Since and Because.
Ditto. And ditto. I agree that indiscriminate replacement of since with because may seem finicky, but since — ahem — because I find the latter word more pleasing, I reserve the right to prefer it.

6. Never end a sentence with a preposition.
This rule is ridiculous, to start with. If you believe it, please tell me what planet you are from. Give it up. What are you striving for? Do I get my point across
The stricture against closing sentences with words that describe position stems from an eighteen-century fetish for the supposed perfection of classical Latin, which allowed no split infinitives — for the excellent reason that Latin infinitives consist of single words. English, however, being a distant relative of that language, should be allowed to form its own customs.