CuteWriting

Here are a few words: Accordingly Also Henceforth Indeed In fact As a result However Therefore Hence Moreover Meanwhile Certainly Nonetheless Otherwise Finally Incidentally Likewise Meanwhile All of these are adverbs, which can function also as conjunctions. Hence, they are called conjunctive adverbs. An adverb is any term that modifies a verb, adjective, or another adverb, and a conjunction is a term that connects two clauses. When using conjunctive adverbs, you should follow punctuation rules carefully. When a conjunctive adverb connects two independent clauses, it is actually like two different sentences. But the second sentence is made to factually depend on the first with the conjunctive adverb. Therefore, the first sentence should end in a semicolon or a period, and the conjunctive adverb should be followed by a comma. Here are examples: Alan is only a chiropractor; naturally, he has never had the respect of an actual doctor. James is no longer with the ...

These two constructions always make me confused. Could you just explain them to me, please? – James Vaughn James is not the only person that has this doubt. These two are complex constructions, and are frowned upon by many native and foreign speakers of English. So, let's have a look at them today. Both 'No Sooner…Than' and 'Hardly…When' are used to mean exactly the same. It is when something has happened just before something else. The first of the actions, expressed with 'no sooner' or 'hardly', has happened right before the part after 'than' or 'when'. One thing to remember with these constructions is never to use 'when' with 'no sooner' or 'than' with 'hardly'. No sooner is clearly a comparative construction and has to be followed by 'than' as in any comparative form. You can replace 'hardly' with 'scarcely'. Examples: Here are a few examples for you to understand...

Earlier, you may remember we published a list of confusable words . Here we are again, with such a list of words. Abjure/Adjure: Abjure means "to formally renounce (give up) something" such as a position. Adjure on the other hand means 'to appeal to' or 'solemnly order'. The governor decided to abjure his position due to political pressure. Normally, adjuring to the subordinates doesn't give many results. Amount/Number: Use amount when you have uncountable subject. Use number when it is countable. The amount of love one gets depends on the number of friends one has. Appraise/Apprise: Appraise is the word applied to quantitative evaluation of something. Apprise means 'communicate' or 'inform'. Appraising diamonds is the work of an expert. Joe apprised me of the schedule of events. Attorney/Lawyer/Solicitor: These terms are highly misinterpreted and confused by many people. Let me clarify. In the US, an attorney is any member...

Let's say you started your blog today. After setting it up basically, you did some search engine submissions, some social media work, and emailed your contacts. Let's see what can alienate your readers from your first blog. 1. Theme Vs. Loading Time There are already coolest looking blogs in the blogosphere. The readers are no longer looking for really a great design. All they want now is content that loads really faster. The era of Flash and design gimmicks is long gone. So, make sure your blog loads within the first four seconds. 2. Advertisements Readers know of Adsense and various other forms of ads. They frown now upon links with tiny descriptions and a URL at the end, as they have already on banners. It is always best to wait until your blog starts getting at least fifty daily search engine visits before adding advertisements. 3. Widgets Don't think readers love it if you spice your blog up with widgets like the fancy clock, social network profile pics, et...

This blog was born on the March 12th of 2008. Today, we are celebrating the first birthday of the blog. So far, CuteWriting has gone through several landmarks. Within the first few months, it was regarded to be one of the best writing-related blogs out there. Now, CW also deals with several different topics and answers reader questions. The diversification was necessary as we found out that most of the readers of this blog originally wanted posts on Blogging tips and search engine optimization. Creative writing can only make a tiny part of the blog now. Initial work on creating quality content has proved successful as CW got several hundreds of incoming links to various posts and testimonials and positive reviews from several websites. Now, the blog ranks high in search engines for many of its posts. We are vowed to publish only useful entries for our readers (don't take care of the sponsored entries, which are separately labeled and are maintained only for monetization). ...

Let's have a revisit to the punctuation arena. Today's topic is exclamation marks and how to use them correctly. An exclamation mark is used to convey surprise, shout, awe, anger, or any such strong emotion. Please note that you should use it mostly in the conversational sort of writing and in dialogs. Here are some tips. 1. Don't use two exclamations or three together ever. 2. Use them as sparingly as possible especially in formal writing. 3. Don't use them with question marks (?!) 4. Don't use them in normal sentences, only on sentences which convey strong emotions in an informal fashion. Here are a few examples for you to follow. Wow, it's a lovely view! How irritable those kids are! She cried, "It's astounding!" Good heavens! "Ouch! It hurt" I didn't do that. I swear!

Here today, let's see how JavaScript can be used to change the font size of your blog pages in real time. This is pretty convenient for your readers as they will be able to increase the size of the text at their wish. Just include the following JS code in the head section of your blog (after <head> tag) or import through an external JS file. Please note, with this code, we are increasing and decreasing the font size for the entire body HTML element. If you wish to localize the effect, use a separate tag such as 'p', 'font', or 'span', and use the tag on the body of your HTML. var minSize=6; var maxSize=24; function plusFont() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('body'); for(i=0;i<s.length;i++) { if(s[i].style.fontSize) { var t = parseInt(s[i].style.fontSize.replace("px","")); } else { var t = 10; } if(t!=maxSize) { t += 1; } s[i].style.fontSize = t+"px"; } } function minusFont() { var s ...

Look at these sentences: The members of the parliament and their wives were present at the party, and most of them were visibly under the influence. In order to improve their prowess, amateur actors were cast alongside professionals, and they looked slightly offended. Tom and his brother are in the same company, and he is doing better. All these sentences have at least two main nouns and one pronoun, which arouses confusion as to which it is referring to. This article will help you think more of your readers in order to avoid confusion in sentences involving pronouns. Pronoun Agreement Every pronoun refers to one noun, which may have been referenced in the same sentence or anyone preceding it. The pronoun should always agree with the noun. Pronouns like anyone, every, each, none, etc., are singular, while they, these, all, etc., are always plural. Check out these sentences: Jenny's friends were home, and they were excited (clearly, they refers to Jenny's friends). J...

In today's blogging tip, we will see how we can show only post titles on the monthly archive pages and category lists on Blogger. An individual post page will be displayed normally. Before going into the tweak, let's analyze its benefits. If you are a prolific blogger, you may write at least one post daily, sometimes more. There are bloggers who post five times a day. In a month, thus, you may have at least thirty posts published. When search engines rank pages, they often return Blogger monthly archive pages as results. Gladly, since the label pages on Blogger are excluded from search engines, they are not returned as results. These category pages and archives consist normally of the entire post content and tend to be extremely large. With this tweak, you will be able to reduce the size of these posts to that of a mere link list. Imagine if you have posts of a thousand words and a lot of images on certain days. These posts individually take a lot of time to load in bro...

There have been quite a bit of interaction and reading of some posts on this blog. Here is a list of posts that have attracted the greatest attention to date. Maybe you will find this interesting for a refresher, or for the interest of commenting for getting maximum exposure for your links. We have carefully excluded posts which are not relevant for long term, but secured surges of traffic due to newsworthiness. 1. Unethical Business Practices by Associated Content 2. Short Story Magazines and Websites: A Comprehensive List 3. Press Release Sites: The Best and the Worst 4. Constant Content: The Best Field for Technical Writing 5. En Dash, Em Dash, and Hiphen 6. Grammar Tip: Suffixes Which Form Noun From Adjectives or Verbs 7. Grammar Tip: I Vs. Me, Who Vs. Whom, and Starting a Sentence With So 8. Using Similes and Metaphors Correctly 9. Professional Blogging Part II: Lifestyle of a Professional Blogger 10. 20 Beautiful Professional Blogger Templates You May Want to Use If ...