Melissa Maygrove

I hope you don't mind covering commonly confused words again this week. These lessons are easy to throw together when scheduling blog posts ahead of time, and I needed a few to get me through the rest of the summer and make the first couple of back-to-school weeks less stressful. Here we go...  

I'm a woman on a mission... To banish Captcha (aka 'word verification') from blogs. To that end, I designed some blog buttons that advertise Captcha-Free-ness.  If you want to encourage visitors to follow your blog, then grab a blog button and put it in your sidebar. How do you do that?

One of my goals when I pre-scheduled July's posts was to keep at least SOME of them brief, but then I got tagged in a couple of memes, and one of the shortest posts ever in the history of my blog turned into two long ones (read: blame Carrie Butler ). :P  I managed to sneak in a short one today. Maybe I'll be more successful in August...

They're all a source of comfort. And they all contain a homophone.  Yep. We're covering more commonly confused words this week...

I thought I'd take a little detour from discussing the craft per se and talk about random stuff — my life, social media, my writing goals and the like. Skim the icons and read what interests you. It's the middle of July. My son, the one with autism, has a half-day class for the next few weeks designed to work on his social skills and prepare him for middle school. His twin will be transferring to middle school, too, but from a home school setting. (Yup. I'm one of those weird homeschool moms.) In about six weeks, all three kids will be in public school, at the same time, for the first time in four years — my oldest a freshman in high school! I will miss them, but I will have some peaceful days to write. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Today I'm going to list sets of words that are the source of common errors in writing and explain each version and its proper usage. The first set is anyone vs any one. Anyone is an indefinite pronoun, whereas any one is an adjective phrase that refers to an unspecified thing or individual. One way to remember is you can use anyone when you mean anybody .   Does anyone know who took Mary home? There were over twenty people at the party. It could have been any one of them. Next let's look at altogether and all together. The phrase all together means doing something collectively as a group, while the word altogether means entirely.

I was tagged (Again!) by Carrie Butler , this time for The Magic 8 Ball Meme — a meme started by Jaycee DeLorenzo, the creator of the wildly popular Lucky 7.  Carrie and Jaycee are two of seven awesome ladies who run NA Alley , a blog that's all about the flourishing New Adult genre .   In short, here are the rules: 1. Post the button and link to http://blog.jayceedelorenzo.com (following would be nice, but not required).   Done & done. 2.  Share an excerpt from your current WIP, perhaps something you're struggling with, are stuck on, or just can't "get right."