You sit down to write… and nothing comes out.
The cursor blinks. Your coffee gets cold. The brilliant idea you had yesterday? Gone.
If you’ve ever stared at a blank page wondering if your creativity has left the building, you’re not alone.
I used to think that the same punctuation rules applied no matter what you were writing. But I was wrong: there are four major editing styles, and each one has its own rules.
Writing fantasy is very different than writing science fiction. After a lot of pondering, I managed to come up with some simple rules that make a lot of sense and help one to avoid the overuse (or underuse) of capitalization.
Is it grammatically correct to use they as a singular pronoun?
There are enough rules about when to use a comma and when not to use one to drive any normal person insane. Have you ever noticed that sometimes there are commas between adjectives and sometimes there aren’t? Why is that? Order of AdjectivesDid you know that there is an order in which adjectives should appear?…
The words your character just yelled are so very important, and you want to be sure those who will be reading your story notice them. How do you draw attention to those words? How do you convey their importance to your readers?
Does it really matter if you use single quotation marks or regular quotation marks? Yes, it does. It all depends on what they are being used for. It turns out that the majority of the time, regular quotation marks are called for. Regular Quotation MarksRegular quotation marks are used to indicate a direct quotation or…
