Carelessness and its humorous effects

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Most of us write everyday. We consider ourselves accurate and fast communicators. We send hundreds of emails to family, friends, and business acquaintances. We send text messages that use specific vocabularies, abbreviations, and emoticons. We are adept at changing our vocabulary and grammar to account for all our different audiences. However, most of us are not as careful as we ought to be, particularly when writing to people we have never met or people with whom we have business relationships.

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Writer's Block

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Sometimes it's hard to get started writing. I read all kinds of essays where the first paragraph is almost nonsense. Words, sentence fragments, just ideas that only barely relate to what a person really wants to write about. It takes almost a full page to get to the good stuff. We worry so much about that first word. What is it going to be? Where will it lead us? Is it going to be a good word, the right word? But the first word doesn't matter at all. We can always delete whatever it is. We can replace it with something else. The important thing is to start writing, whatever that writing is.

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The importance of spelling

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I know we all have spellcheck and we've read those little poems that people write explaining how spellcheck doesn't solve all your spelling mistakes. Now we even have those forwards about text messages gone wrong. People love to  revel in the surprising language that emerges from some of the smallest spelling mistakes.

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To email a stranger

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Advancing technology has altered our perceptions of generic conventions in interesting ways. What exactly is the difference between a text message and an email? Do we expect them to have different kinds of writing in them? To address different people in our lives? Do we accept different responses as "timely"?

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First Post!

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Welcome to Appendance's blog: Appendances! (If you say it funny, it almost sounds like a British "Happenstances"). Here we will provide writing tips, writing-related anecdotes, and various other tidbits having to do with writing, editing, copyediting, development, any and all aspects of the writing and revising process. We hope to answer your questions about writing and editing while entertaining you a little!