Thank-you AG. I'm pleased to be being advanced and am grateful for your help. It's been fun and this section has been much more challenging. I look forward to the next.

I don't know if you've read any of my posts elsewhere: if you have, you'll know me for an argumentative bugger! Looking at your comments, I would offer the following responses. I would like your further views if you wouldn't mind looking at them.

Long sentences: Comes from reading too many rules and regulations at work ... (But I once took a whole side of an exercise book to write one sentence at school, just to wind up my English Master! Teenage boys, huh?)

So what's wrong with this one? Only 42 words, and none of them out-of-the-ordinary. I suppose I could have written,

Pet commissions were not very popular in the profession because it was difficult to reproduce the lifelike qualities the poor creature would have had in life, no matter how accurate the physical mount would be. And customers were often not entirely satisfied. <wicked grin>



Next point : Mavis was a quiet young woman. Very interested in nature and natural ways of living.

So now my sentences are too short?

This is really a question of style, isn't it? I know I write jerky sentences sometimes, but I feel it gives a kind of vitality to what I'm saying: almost as I think of it (which is usually the case). I do realise that it can become tiresome too, however.



Beginning sentences with "And": see Matthew 1:21

Again, style. But I am prepared to accept I should tone it down a little.



Everything else I agree with and accept. Regarding the girls being untied in the coffin, this was after they had been drugged, and it was an oversight not to have mentioned it. S/ows the importance of having h/
a good copy-editor.

Once again, thanks

TYWD