Some say that ‘whom’ is going out of fashion and that you should not bother about it at all. This sounds too easy don’t you think? So, in the meantime …
If you could replace the word in question with he/she/they/I - it’s who.
If you’d say him/her/them/me - it’s whom.
It seems to be working for me but I’m sure that like all good rules there will be an exception that will cause me grief.
The latest short word story is posted - Irony.
I totally love irony. I think I can recognise it in an instant and I love the innate sense of humour, dark or otherwise, that it involves. Try to explain it though and I struggle. It either just is or it isn’t, you get it or you don’t.
This story has come from my own experience of ‘feeling the irony’. It is a completely fictional story but something similar did happened once upon a long time ago in a distant land …
I could not ‘create’ irony from scratch, not that clever, and so I had to turn to a memory of the feeling. Challenging word this one.
Writing dialogue takes practice. Content is one thing, punctuation is another.
A lifetime of formulating reports and briefings did not prepare me for this aspect of fiction writing at all.
We are told that dialogue done well, particularly with the punctuation correct, is seamless and goes unnoticed by the reader. Too true. I do not have any idea how my favourite written dialogue passages are punctuated.
There is plenty of sage advice on how to write good, engaging and compelling dialogue; but it is near to useless if you have not got the punctuation under control!
