Fiction? Nonfiction? It doesn’t matter. It’s all about getting started, but you’ll need a few supplies, and some directions, for your journey: 1. The Elevator Pitch Imagine you’re in an elevator, and a literary agent, a theatrical producer, or a movie star steps in. After a quick greeting (we’re fantasizing here), you mention that you’re … Read more
Abbreviations deriving from Latin terms and phrases can be troublesome for us non-Latin speakers. Here’s the long and short of the most common short forms adopted into English from the classical language: 1. e.g. This abbreviation of exempli gratia (“for example”) is not only often left bereft of its periods (or styled eg.), it’s also … Read more
Writers often fall into a tense trap and don’t even notice. A tense trap is not a trap that makes you tense; it’s when you get stuck in past tense when the phenomena you are describing is perpetual or at least valid to the present moment. Here are some sample tense traps and their simple … Read more
Thanks to widespread confusion about the correct treatment of prefixes and suffixes, syllables and words attached before or after root words, many people persist in inserting hyphens more frequently than necessary. Essentially, however, hyphens seldom belong in prefixed and suffixed words: Prefixes and root words are almost always combined without hyphens (prepaid, nonprofit, posttraumatic). Exceptions … Read more
Sentences can be short. They can also be long. This is a good thing. Lack of variety is wearying. It may drive you to distraction. It’s a good thing that sentences can be short or long, because lack of variety is wearying and may drive you to distraction. Which paragraph was easier to read? If … Read more
For some people, if a topic interests them, they are quite content to immerse themselves in extensive online articles that are otherwise indistinguishable from print content. Most Web site visitors, however, have a different set of expectations when they read on a computer screen. Nearly every medium has its own rules; here are seven tips … Read more
A team of two or more words that band together to provide detail about a person, place, or thing are called phrasal adjectives, or adjectival phrases. The name’s not important, but it is essential that you employ hyphens to link these tag teams to clarify the relationships between adjectives (and, sometimes, conjunctions) and the nouns … Read more
As a copywriter, I have access to two of the greatest writing improvement tools in existence: practice and feedback. I spend 40 hours a week pumping out words that will be tweaked, replaced, moved, cut, checked, rechecked, and rejected or selected. Every red mark on my ad copy teaches me how to improve my fiction. … Read more
One of the many fascinating features of our language is how often words with pleasant associations are also quite pleasing on the tongue and even to the eye, and how many words, by contrast, acoustically and visually corroborate their disagreeable nature — look no further than the heading for this post. Enrich the poetry of … Read more
There are two types of grammar: Descriptive, which describes what is customary, and prescriptive grammar, which prescribes what should be. A tension between the two systems is inevitable — and healthy; it keeps us thinking about what we’re saying and writing. Allowing mob rule at the expense of some governing of composition is madness, but … Read more
Scrambled sentence structure can lead to humorous or at least head-shaking imagery that readers will stumble on. Be alert in your writing for infelicitous misplacement of meaning: 1. “Kangaroo babies are the size of a lima bean at birth.” But we’re not told how big a lima bean is at birth. Oh — perhaps it … Read more
Attribution is the convention in composition of identifying a speaker or writer when you include direct quotes (which should be enclosed in quotation marks) or paraphrases. An entire system of usage — a choreography, if you will — has developed around how to arrange quotations and paraphrases and their attributions. Here are the dance steps: … Read more