Plurals of Names

As it’s Christmastime, this is a good time to cover the plural of names. Most names you just add s to:
Hammers
Bishops
Butchers
Jacksons
Carpenters

What if your name already ends in an s? Add es:
Williamses
Evanses
Lewises

Then there’s a few other forms:
Valdezes
Rileys

Wrong:
Hammer’s
Bishop’s
Williams’

For practical purposes, it’s probably easier to write “from the Williams family” rather than “from the Williamses.”

Trick to Remember
Plurals are formed by adding s or es. If you don’t sign your name with an apostrophe normally, then it will not ever obtain one. Apostrophes never ever ever make a plural.

Review: The Warrior Heir

The Warrior Heir (The Heir Chronicles #1) by Cinda Williams Chima

Young Adult — Urban Fantasy
☆☆☆

In this version of the world, magic is kept secret, but the various factions of magic users don’t work well together, with wizards generally bullying the rest. Sixteen-year-old Jack was supposed to be a Wizard but ended up a Warrior, which is pretty rare and starts causing problems for him.

There are a lot of tropes and cliches here, but I still liked it, if that makes sense. I loved the action scenes and was pulled in by the sense of danger. But sometimes the in-between, character-building scenes were dry and bland. It’s like Chima put them in because they were necessary and spent as little time polishing them as possible.

The ending was rather deus ex machina; I was hoping for something sneakier. But overall I really enjoyed it.

Now, a word about the audiobook. It’s BAD. It’s not the narrator’s fault; he was fine. I blame the sound engineer.



You can hear the narrator’s breathing. It’s constant. Sometimes I thought I heard pages turning. There’s a two-second pause every other sentence for the narrator to breathe. On top of that, there’s a deliberate three-second break in between each track (WTH?) that is also preceded by a loud deep breath. (It sounds like he’s holding his breath!) So every 3-4 minutes, you hear deep breath-silence—and more silence in between. If the sequels are like this, I’m bailing on the audio version.

Book Lovers’ Memes (Part 2)

*all right

Commas: Introductory Phrases

This is a very common use of the comma. It’s easier to learn by examples than technical academic terms:

Having forgotten to buy ingredients, I went out to dinner.
Because it was easier, we stayed in the for night.
At the conclusion of the meeting, we had donuts.

There’s a natural pause where the commas occur, so you’re pretty safe following your gut. If the introduction is followed by a verb (usually some form of is), however, there is no comma.

Walking next to the wagons were children.
Coming straight at him was the baseball.
At the conclusion of the meeting were donuts.

Trick to Remember
Look for the natural pause and you’ll be right most of the time.