Wordsmith Mugs

Dickens' First Encounter with a Martini

Novel, Novella, Novellette, Novellini

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky plan a collaboration - 'War and Punishment'... it'll make us a bundle.

"There are some words I will not tolerate in this house-and 'awesome' is one of them."

"I translate books from English into better English."

"You have no idea what it's like to be a 'just between you and me' person in a 'just between you and I' world."

"We saved your life. However, your colon is now a semicolon"

Skywriter's Block

"No Shakespeare, yet. But, they are churning out ten drug names a week."

I won THAT Pulitzer for a drug name.

"It's plotted out. I just have to write it."

'The Doctor will see you now. Here's your medical jargon dictionary.'

'126,000 words done...now I just need to work out what order to put them in.'

'I say to hell with it. If it can't be said in English, it ain't worth saying at all.'

Grammarian.

'Are you the new English teacher?' 'Yes I are!'

The Best of Times/The Worst of Times

'It was a last-minute change, but a good one.'

Someone who knows apostrophes

"I read your college application essay. First of all, the word college has two l's."

student to teacher: 'I have trouble with punctuation. I just don't have any comma sense.'

'Think of an essay as a collection of tweets only joined together.'

Books/How to get to the point/Volume 1

"Writing is... rewriting."

'Of course creative writing is important. You want to write home for money when you go away to college,don't you?'

'A lawyer orders lunch.'

Present Tense/Present Simple/Present Progressive/Present Perfect/Present Past.

'I'd like to push the envelope, go the extra mile, and think outside the box to facilitate a win-win solution to the over-utilization of buzzwords.'

"We're still pretty far apart. I'm looking for a six-figure advance and they're refusing to read the manuscript."

'After you grade my report, may I have my intellectual property back?'

'I miss the good old days when all we had to worry about was nouns and verbs.'

'Give me two pronouns.'

"Baxter...about this report...your punctuation, spelling and grammar are perfect. No one can understand it!"

What's the big surprise? All the latest theories of linguistics say we're born with the innate capacity for generating sentences.

'I eliminated all the platitudes and cliche statements, from your mission statement, and I'm left with this blank sheet of paper.'