If you’re wondering where my post was on Thursday, fear not. User error is the cause. I failed to actually click “post.” Look for it this week!
Progress
Progress remains slow on the plan, but with the adjusted schedule in mine, I’m a lot happier this week than I was last week. I have almost 20,000 words of the third draft complete. Scrivener tells me that is 53 pages, for those of you who have asked.
I’ve sped up some since I purchased a Nintendo Switch. Yes, you read that correctly. I’m more productive now that I have some quality bait. The key is to set a goal for writing and play Zelda only after that goal is accomplished. I’m writing this blog entry after a 45 minute foray into the game, which followed 45 minutes on the novel.
Commas
This week in Julie’s glamorous writing adventures: the comma. I had no idea how many rules existed for commas, and might never have known if not for Grammarly. The tool continually found errors in my comma placement. I’d put a comma in a sentence, and it would tell me to remove it. Or I wouldn’t have a comma, and it would want me to add it. The commas in this paragraph are brought to you by Grammarly.
I knew of the Oxford comma debate. I knew I needed commas. The only rule I followed was to put them where I paused in a sentence, though, and apparently, that isn’t sufficient. I’m sure somebody told me the rules earlier in my life, but that was at least twenty years ago. As an engineer, putting commas in the pauses has worked out just fine. Yet here I am, looking up comma rules.
Grammarly wanted me to know that “glamorous” and “comma” in the first sentence of the paragraph above is an “unusual word pair.” Thanks, Grammarly.
Some Comma Resources
Grammarly – Commas in Complex Sentences
St Petersburg College Libraries – Compound Sentences
The Punctuation Guide – Comma
