Bronte Follower: Blog

Thank you to all who provided feedback to my previous post (Grammarly and "couple"); I was pleasantly surprised by so many taking the time to respond. I received constructive arguments and explanations from many, the upshot of which is that Grammarly is correct, although a COUPLE OF respondents pointed out that the construction lacking the preposition is now colloquially accepted, so I might be justified in skipping the preposition in a character's speech.

To summarize a COUPLE OF responses, "couple" is a noun in the usage and the following noun (whether raisins or girls) should be part of a prepositional phrase describing "couple." The phrase is no different from others like "horn of plenty" or "hall of fame;" that is, neither "horn plenty" nor "hall fame" makes any sense.

For you writers, particularly those who use some sort of grammatical check on your efforts, I have a question.

Do you find that the program, whatever it is (I use Grammarly, obviously), insists that you insert "of" when writing things such as "a couple questions?" (I wish I could show you the red underline Grammarly put under "couple.")

I've been thinking about that, and it makes no sense to me. If I replace "couple" with "two," Grammarly objects not at all to "two questions." Nor does it object to "a few questions." That is, it does not insist on "two of questions" or "a few of questions." It seems to me that this is due to some holdover of ancient origin, and I think it's long past time that we abandon it along the roadside with the many other English aspects we've jettisoned as English has evolved. And I'm a reactionary purist when it comes to English!

My work time in the field became something of a disaster, with little we did working, forcing us to be out longer than anticipated, both per-day and overall. I got home and immediately came down with a no-doubt-deployment-related bad cold that made my brain too fuzzy to write. I'm finally coming out of that and hope to get back to the writing I had intended to get done in the evenings when in the field. Look for new chapters to _Las Amadas and The Team_, _A New Tree_, and _Sandy II_ next week.

Through some mixup or other, my Halloween story (Trick or Treat, Suck My Teat) did not get posted until today. Oh, well.

I'm in the final stages of editing Book Two of _Beth_ for Bookapy, which might be available in a week or two. I apologize to those readers of _Beth_ who came in late and had not gotten anywhere near the end (one recent correspondent had reached only Chapter 34) when all but the intro and first chapters were taken down to support publication at Bookapy. I hope to stay ahead of re-editing the rest of the story so that there will be as little delay as possible while we get subsequent _Beth_ books available at Bookapy.

I've not gotten much written in _Las Amadas and The Team_ of late, due to a writing project for work and, now, my recent deployment into the field. I will probably get little or nothing done for the _Beth_ sequel until returning home, probably late next week. I did manage to sneak enough time to finish off Chapter 15; it's in the publication queue for tonight.

I see that the first book of Beth (Chapters 1-20) is available, with a link at the end of the SOL Chapter 1 of the story. I apologize for the clunky way this has gone, but this is my first experience with this.