Elizabeth Burton's Page

I suspect one of the reasons choosing when to use that instead of which is in part to blame on the ever-evolving nature of the language. If you read books written in the first half of the 20th century, they were used interchangeably--or rather, which was used where both words are now.

This is one of those situations where you need to know a bit of grammar, namely, what's meant by a "nonrestrictive element." The element is either a phrase, which is a group of words, or a cla… Continue

One of the writer's tools the English language offers and that enriches our prose and poetry is also, apparently, one of the most confusing: prepositions. Understandably, those for whom English is a second language find the nuances that distinguish one preposition's meaning from another confusing; but it seems we native speakers also can have problems. I suspect some of that arises from regional colloquialisms and speech forms, but as writers we need to get past the way we're used to hear… Continue

These two sets of verbs trip up more people than just about anything else. I'll try to make this explanation as simple as I can to help with the confusion.

Lie and sit are something people do.
Lay and set are something people do to other things.

In grammar-speak, that means lay and set take an object, and because the action taken with that object is directly affected by the verb, it's called (to no surprise) a direct object.

The tenses for l… Continue

Use who when you're talking about people, and that for places and things.

John is the one who broke the vase.

This is the face that launched a thousand ships.

For some collective nouns, such as family and group, which word you use will impact how your reader reacts emotionally to the sentence. Who will arouse a more intimate, personal feeling than that, so if your character says that hers was a family that stood apart from… Continue

I suppose I should just appreciate the irony. Having set up this site to allow my authors to introduce themselves and their books to people who like to read and hang out with authors, the right columns of our pages--the Google Ads--are all from subsidy publishers.

That only matters if you know how long and hard we've had to struggle NOT to be associated with the subsidy publishers who use our same printing method, usually referred to as print-on-demand or POD. I suppose I should just pr… Continue