Mussri

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Dec 15	comment	Is it a bad writing practice to start sentences with a verb? @LaurenI, Well, if you did 'eventually' understand me then there's something very wrong in what I said, or at least horribly unclear. Should I delete my comments just in case?
Dec 15	comment	Looking for a verb that means “making something looks very simple by ignoring its complexity or details” How about 'dilute' or 'abridge'? Neither mean what you're asking for literally but I imagine one could use either by some creative license but it depends on your field.
Dec 15	comment	Is it a bad writing practice to start sentences with a verb? @LaurenI, I assumed I'd clarified this by correcting 'sentences' to 'phrases' earlier but no. What would you call a strictly SVO construct? All English [something] are SVO modified by adjuncts/conjunctions/... which as a whole make a sentence but I'm short on vocab here.
Dec 14	comment	Is it a bad writing practice to start sentences with a verb? @LaurenI, No. Smith's examples are correct but his sentences are what varied not the phrases. This's a hopeful rephrasing: what I meant to say is that English is always SVO (unlike, eg., Arabic, which supports SVO and VSO among others) and that what alex meant is structural variety which has nothing to do with proper verbs. The verbs should be near the topic of the sentence in the middle/end (even if one could do otherwise grammatically) and that focusing on using their other forms to achieve variety is undesirable as it might get formulaic. I hope I've cleared that up...
Dec 14	comment	Is it a bad writing practice to start sentences with a verb? @LaurenI, Which? Although now I think I should have said "English phrases* can only ever start with nouns or a suitable substitute."* which might not change anything so which part do you disagree with?
Dec 14	comment	Is it a bad writing practice to start sentences with a verb? English sentences can only ever start with nouns or a suitable substitute. Exceptions include phrases in the imperative and certain idioms and expressions. Pronouns can, and often should, be substituted for nouns in fiction as always referring to an object by its proper name/noun gets troublesome quickly; ask the guys behind Lojban. So you can't have a problem with 'over-using' pronouns. The structure might need some work and variation, but I can't help with that. What you call 'verbs' (talking-hearing-...) are gerunds or present participles, somewhat more 'nouns' than 'verbs'.
Dec 14	comment	Are music lyrics copyrighted? By "referencing the song/someone's work in yours", do you mean quoting it, using it in the plot somehow, or simply naming it? Would I need permission to write that a character was listening to [singer-here]'s song named [song-name]?
Dec 9	awarded	Popular Question
Nov 29	awarded	Yearling
Nov 23	comment	Effective ways to enrich your active vocabulary? I'll second Vocabulary.com. Although I first recommended it on another question that asked how to 'expand vocabulary' not '-active vocabulary'. But I found myself using the new words I learned there, even though they should be 7th grade-lvl in an English-speaking country. Because it shows the word in context, I get a 'feel' not a definition of it, and because it asks me to use it in an appropriate context -without my knowing that it is the needed word- means that I use it, understanding when I should use, without thinking that I should; it just fits in.
Nov 19	comment	How does one write a character smarter than oneself? @LaurenI, References, please?
Nov 19	comment	Striking the balance between dialogue and narrative You, YOU! ;) Still, non of the answers offers the golden rule, sadly, of whose existence I'm at best skeptical. Highly praised works, I noticed, tend to focus more on narration (implying more complex stories) while those from 'more-amateur' writers focus on dialog (implying weak story-craft). But that's according to critics; no doubt I enjoyed The Lake of the Long Sun; I, Robot; LOTR and the like, but I liked the HP books more, merely because I could remember how the characters 'felt' to me, not only how they felt. HP had about twice the dialog of the aforementioned classics.
Nov 15	revised	Decide on a theme/overarching meaning before writing a short story? part in parentheses is 'as opposed to' that before it; clarified
Nov 15	suggested	suggested edit on Decide on a theme/overarching meaning before writing a short story?
Nov 14	answered	Where can I find a good vocabulary list?
Nov 7	revised	How do authors incorporate languages they don't speak? +1 section; proofread
Nov 4	revised	How do authors incorporate languages they don't speak? a bit of editing/adding - not clean yet
Nov 3	comment	Is there any good time-line software out there? LL are working on a sister program called Scapple. Despite being in beta, initial opinion makes me believe it could work quite well in this. The beta is only for OS X, though.
Nov 3	answered	How do authors incorporate languages they don't speak?
Oct 31	comment	How do authors incorporate languages they don't speak? Eg. In Arabic, a native might write (but not often say) the following lit. "As if birds were above their heads." to mean that a group of people are together and dead silent, so as to not scare the figurative birds. In English, I imagine you'd say "They're walking on egg shells.".