Face it, we English speakers (which presumably includes you, since you’re reading this) don’t always read and write the same language, even if we all call it English. Sure, someone trying to communicate in a language that isn’t their native language may have a harder time being understood. But we understand that and make allowances … Read more
You probably know Stephen King from his novels and fiction books. While King might not be as renowned as some other contemporary writers, he does know how to sell books. The Positivity Blog recently published an article with Seven writing tips coming from Stephen King’s “On Writing.” Here is a quotation from point four: King … Read more
If you want people to read your web content, you have to make it appeal to them. Here’s how to do it. First, pick a great title – or a good one. A good title is one that tells the reader what your article or post is about. You can use humor or you can … Read more
Whether you are writing a magazine article, a college essay or an email to a client, getting your text free of mistakes is essential. The spell checker helps, but it is far from foolproof. That is where proofreading comes in. Below you will find 8 tips and techniques to make your proofreading sessions more effective. … Read more
Reading a blog post or a web article should be easy. Some web pages have large blocks of text with very few breaks between them. When I see those, my brain does the TMI (too much information) dance and my eyes move on until they find something easier to look at. When you try to … Read more
I’m an editor and moderator at Toasted Cheese, a literary magazine and writing community. Recently, one of our members posted a question that I thought was worth addressing here. He’d turned in a college paper, and his professor told him he needed to “create more distance from the reader.” It all comes down, I think, … Read more
You took too many English classes. Someone has told you that it’s more important to say it right than to say it at all. Well, it is important to write correctly. It makes your communication clearer, and your reputation brighter. But it’s usually better to say what you mean poorly than to say nothing. Why? … Read more
English teachers like myself love to warn new writers against the evils of passive voice. Here at Daily Writing Tips, Michael has written about passive writing, and I recently wrote about dummy subjects, but it looks like there’s still some confusion about passive voice and its use. For more on passive vs. active sentence construction, … Read more
Writers, especially beginning writers, are often cautioned against using passive voice in their writing because its use slows down the pace. Another construction that can make your writing plod is the dummy subject. When we use the words it and there to begin a sentence without a referent (a noun the pronoun is referring to), … Read more
If you’ve never read George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” treat yourself. Written more than half a century ago, it remains as timely in 2007 as it was when he wrote it. Unfortunately. In this essay Orwell discusses the political use of language to manipulate and obscure: Millions of peasants are robbed … Read more
Its a fact that a spell checker will not catch all the mistakes on your text. More specifically, it will not catch misspellings that form other valid words. So how do you solve this problem? Proofreading, of coarse! Just read again through you’re text trying to spot words that don’t fit, and make sure to … Read more
What does it mean to use vivid language in your writing? Language that is vivid paints a picture for your readers, so that they can clearly envision what you are talking about. Vivid language is very important to descriptive writing. Let’s look at the sentence: I took a trip to the mountains. Does this paint … Read more