The Final Touch

Not too many homo­phones trip me up, but one set con­sis­tently seems to.

Homo­phones? you ask.

Homo­phones are words that sound alike but are spelled dif­fer­ently and/or mean dif­fer­ent things. For exam­ple: to, too, two; or its, it’s; or all, awl. The list goes on and on. The one that has often sent me to the dic­tio­nary to double-check is this set: palate, pal­let, palette.

This morn­ing, over at Gram­mar Girl Mignon Fogarty’s “Quick & Dirty Tips” web­site, she offers some tricks to keep the three straight. Very helpful!

Palate can be remem­bered by its end­ing, –ate, because your palate is the roof of your mouth or your taste pref­er­ences. It has to do with food, so think of the past tense of “eat.”

It’s harder to come up with a good trick for pal­let, which refers to the plat­form goods are loaded and shipped on, or to a nar­row bed. Gram­mar Girl sug­gests think­ing of the two “l’s” in the mid­dle of the word as the edges of a nar­row bed. I like to think of them as two of the slats that run cross­wise to make one of those wooden ship­ping pallets.

And a palette is a set of col­ors a painter uses, or the board, often roughly oval-shaped, that holds those pud­dles of paint into which he/she dips the brush. Gram­mar Girl men­tions that –ette is a com­mon French word end­ing, and a lot of famous artists were French (Monet, Renoir, etc.).

I don’t think I’ll have to take time to look up these words again! If you have any good tricks that help you sort out homo­phones, please share in a com­ment below.

Don’t you just LOVE the new logo??!!  See, I can brag about it because I’m not the one who designed it!

So here’s a shout-out to my AWESOME hus­band, who also hap­pens to be a FABULOUS graphic designer, Greg Mann! And a shame­less plug: If you’re in need of graphic-design work — book cover or inte­rior lay­out, posters, brochures, busi­ness cards, logos — he’s the one you want to con­tact! Visit the Face­book page for his busi­ness, Mon­key­Mind Stu­dios, to see pics of his work.

And… I’ve got a chal­lenge for you! There are a num­ber of sym­bols woven into my logo. If you can iden­tify at least one cor­rectly, your name will go into a draw­ing to receive a half-hour of proofreading/copyediting ser­vices from me at no charge (a $10-$15 value). Leave your ideas as a com­ment below. Respond by Mon­day, Novem­ber 7, as that is when I’ll draw the name of a lucky recip­i­ent. You never know when you could use a fresh set of eyes to look over your writ­ing: resume? col­lege appli­ca­tion essay? a paper you’ve writ­ten for school? an arti­cle for pub­li­ca­tion? And there’s no expi­ra­tion date to my offer — only to your chance to respond! So, hey! What are you wait­ing for?!

This is a longer-than-usual post, but since it is a book review, I didn’t want to split it into two or more parts. I hope you will enjoy my reflec­tions and per­haps be moved to read the book your­self. Please let me know what you think in a com­ment below.

I just fin­ished read­ing Bat­tle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (Pen­guin, 2011). It stirred up quite a con­tro­versy upon its release, so I requested it from our local library to see what all the hub­bub was about.

Chua, the American-born daugh­ter of Chi­nese immi­grants, writes of how and why she val­ues the Chi­nese tra­di­tion of parental author­ity and the belief that – in my words, not hers – father and mother really do know best. She uses the terms “Chi­nese par­ent­ing” and “West­ern par­ent­ing” some­what loosely, explain­ing that, of course, nei­ther all Chi­nese par­ents nor all West­ern par­ents see eye to eye. In fact, she acknowl­edges, some actual Chi­nese par­ents have adopted pat­terns of leniency with their kids, while some U.S. par­ents with­out an ounce of Chi­nese blood fall more in line with Chi­nese par­ent­ing than with the style more com­mon in the United States.

Chua shares that as a child, she was not allowed to do such things as the fol­low­ing; nor did she allow her own two daugh­ters, Sophia and Louisa (“Lulu”) to do them:

• Attend a sleepover;
• Have a playdate;
• Choose their own extracur­ric­u­lar activities;
• Get any­thing less than straight As;
• Play any instru­ment other than piano or violin;
• Not play piano or violin.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like me, my sis­ter, Shan­non Hyland-Tassava, is a writer. Actu­ally, she does more orig­i­nal writ­ing at the present, while I am pas­sion­ate about help­ing oth­ers’ writ­ing shine. I’ve writ­ten a few pieces here and there — the Fore­word in a forth­com­ing book, a few arti­cles for the web-zine 10,000 Cou­ples, and some of the monthly con­tent of a sub­scrip­tion pub­li­ca­tion for church newslet­ter cre­ators — but Shan­non now has two essays pub­lished in antholo­gies related to wom­an­hood and moth­er­hood. I invite you to check them out!

The first essay, “The Mommy Wars Killed Our Friend­ship…,” Read the rest of this entry »

I am so delighted to share with you the promo video for a soon-to-be-released book I’ve had the honor of edit­ing. Author Bathsheba Smithen is only in her mid-20s, but she has wis­dom beyond her years. Watch the video (Bathsheba is the first indi­vid­ual in it)… and then read the book’s Fore­word, below, which she also gave me the priv­i­lege of writing:

Editor’s Fore­word

“All is van­ity and a chas­ing after wind. … So I turned to con­sider wis­dom and mad­ness and folly…” (Eccle­si­astes 1:14 and oth­ers; 2:12, NRSV)

When Bathsheba Smithen first invited me to write this Fore­word, I replied with a laugh, “You want a pasty white girl from small-town Min­nesota to intro­duce a book by an African Amer­i­can from Wash­ing­ton, D.C.?!” Read the rest of this entry »

photo © 2005 JP Esper­ança | more info (via: Wylio)

This morn­ing, I took the time to fol­low a few Face­book links posted by peo­ple I know. Each took me to a piece of fine writ­ing recently posted in cyber­space. The arti­cles are quite dif­fer­ent from one another, but what they all have in com­mon is the high cal­iber with which they are writ­ten. I’ll pro­vide links to the arti­cles — as well as to two other exam­ples of fine writ­ing I came across recently — at the end of this post.

Some peo­ple are not con­vinced that the qual­ity of their writ­ing — cor­rect­ness of punc­tu­a­tion, accu­racy of spelling, smooth­ness of sen­tence flow, and so on — really mat­ters. “Peo­ple know what I mean!” groused one writer for whom I used to proof­read. “And if they don’t get it, they’re not the kind of read­ers I want read­ing my stuff any­way.” Well! Read the rest of this entry »