chronodekar said:
@ThreadWeaver,
Bloody Damn Hell !!!!! Your reply there made me realize that I have a hell lot of catching up in the English department. Can you suggest any web-site or something I could use for reference/re-learning?
Also what English are you using British/American? Am guessing the latter.
-chronodekar
Yes, I speak American, not the British form of English. The English dislike it, like a splinter irritating them, when people say that Americans speak English, but they'll have to deal.
Most of what I have is up in my relatively dusty noggin learned over nearly 40 years. A lot of it I remember simply because I learned it in an age where we didn't have the Internet to look crap up with. These days, even I admit losing my edge as I catch myself semi-consciously deciding that, "Hey it's on the net, I don't need to remember this." That disturbs me most of all.
You can search "writing fiction dialogue"; "Dialogue rules"; "English punctuation"; "English tense usage"; "maintaining consistent sentence tenses" and read through some of the stuff.
This is DKG's biggest weakness:
<a href='http://www.towson.edu/ows/tenseconsistency.htm' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>http://www.towson.edu/ows/tenseconsistency.htm</a>
A fair number of his sentences included mixed tenses, and for future reference, he should work on avoiding them. I didn't change most of them as it would have required too much modification. I also felt, as he likely did, that they sort of fell into the grey area nearing the "Timing of Actions requiring tense change" rule.
