Editing is a cognitively demanding skill, and with so much to think about, it is easy to overlook tasks to do and edits to look for. Checklists keep you organized and on track. Learn the power of checklists and how to create and use them.
Crime novelists need to make sure they get the details right when it comes to police work. So in this blog, learn the steps the police go through once a theft is reported to find the criminal and charge them with larceny, burglary, and/or robbery. And as a bonus, learn how to spice up detective work, so it isn’t too boring.
Whether you put punctuation inside or outside quotation marks depends on the punctuation and which regional rules you are following. Learn which punctuation marks go inside, which ones go outside, and which ones sometimes go in and sometimes out in US English.
Free indirect speech is a powerful tool when writing in third person. It gives you the intimacy of first person but with the flexibility of third person. Learn what it is and why you want to use this tool.
Self-publishing is not for the faint of heart. Because there are a lot of steps in the process, it can be a steep learning curve. Learn how to do each step well and the supporting help available to aid you in your journey.
If you are confident you can’t end a sentence with a preposition, shouldn’t split an infinitive, never should use the passive voice, and more, then, I have news for you: your English teacher may have led you astray.Let’s put those so-called grammar rules to rest, like the zombies they are.
“Show, don’t tell” is popular writing advice, but it can be tricky to understand what it really means. Telling is not always bad. But when it takes the reader out of an immersive experience or seems dry, you want to revise to show, don’t tell. This blog shows you how to do that in a variety of ways with clear examples.
Capitalizing words in titles and headings follows a set of style rules. It isn't as simple as capitalize the "big" words and lowercase the "small" words. This blog will walk you through those rules with clear examples.
Apostrophes help form the genitive, possessive, form, and while it seems straightforward to add an apostrophe to make a noun possessive, many of the rules are nuanced or misunderstood, so it's good to clarify. Learn when to use the apostrophe and s versus just the apostrophe and how to handle joint possession and gerunds.
While writing is highly subjective, some objective guidelines for good writing exist. For one, if you start too many sentences in a row with the same pattern (not necessarily the same word), your passage can sound monotonous or choppy. This isn't always the case. But it is a general objective guideline that good writing entails varying your sentence beginnings. Learn the various patterns for starting a sentence and when it's fine to have several in a row start the same way and when a rewrite may be in order.
