Thursday, October 14, 2010

Putting the YES back into writing




You have all seen it and heard it in your writing seminars and classes. Using negative phrasing can be a bad thing. Especially in fiction where you want to get your meaning across as easily as possible.

I kept thinking on this conundrum in writing and tried a bunch of ways of Google to find a site for you to do a little reading about it, but kept coming up with DOUBLE NEGATIVE in my results.

While DNs are a good offspring to this topic, it wasn’t what I intended exactly, so I stuck it into memory for a topic later on. I also was waylaid by these items of interest: Negative effects of hip-hop music, negative and positive effects of marijuana, and positive thinking, which I believe I have already discussed ad nauseam on this blog.

Anyway, go on out and check out the link and then, as they say down here in the south, y’all come back now ya hear?


negative phrasing link

4 comments:

Charmaine Clancy said...

Thanks for the link, checking it out now :-)

s.w. vaughn said...

Ah, very helpful! I was just struggling with a negative sentence the other day - this may have sorted it for me. :-)

Thanks, Kim!

Kim Smith said...

Gotta love putting a yes in place of a no :)

Aaron Paul Lazar said...

Kim, I had to read this news headline many times (and read on) to understand what the heck they were doing to persecute the gay folks now.

"The Obama administration decided on Tuesday to appeal a judge's rulings that prevented the U.S. government from banning same-sex marriages." Talk about using negatives to describe something!