Writing Craft
Some Basics of Showing Writing
Great descriptive writing combines all of the senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound. It transports your readers to a place where they can feel the place and see the characters. The key to doing this, and doing it well, is to combine a variety of sensory imagery in your writing. Generally, we’re pretty good…
Read MoreSentence Structure Matters
Next to your individual word choice, your sentence structure is the basic building block of your voice. Your sentences tell your story, either simply or poetically. They pull your reader in and carry them along. It is possible to write a best-selling novel using basic sentence structure: simple, compound, and with a few more complex…
Read MoreWork on Your Writing Strengths
As a writing teacher, I’ve spent a lot of time helping students improve. Because of this focus, burgeoning writers tend to want to know what they’ve done “wrong,” or their weaknesses. I’m going to posit that this is the wrong approach. Instead, writers should focus on improving their strengths. “Everybody has talent, it’s just a…
Read More6 Comma Rules You Need to Know
It’s finals week here which means that I’ve been reading essay after essay, marking comma error after comma error. I would like to say that only the first year freshmen make these mistakes, but unfortunately, even my senior Creative Writing students struggle with commas. In some fantasy writing dreamworld, we could throw commas around haphazardly,…
Read MoreSpelling Matters
Why does spelling matter? If you spell correctly, readers take you seriously. If you don’t take the time to correct your spelling, they might not take the time to read what you write. Spelling might not matter in a text to a friend or when you’re scribbling down something you want to remember, but when…
Read MoreAvoiding Adverbs
I’ve been to several writing conferences and read many books and articles on writing. One piece of advice that frequently appears is to, at all costs, avoid adverbs. In fact, I’ve heard it so many times, I should write it like this: AVOID ADVERBS ALWAYS!!!! Why? You might be asking. In a nutshell, adverbs are…
Read MoreWhy do Writers use Writing Prompts?
Writers often use writing prompts allow them to find a way in. “In?” you might be asking. “What’s that mean?” It means that writers figure out what they want to write by writing. Unless I write something down or explore it in words, I often don’t know what I’m thinking., and having taught teens writing…
Read MoreGrammar Geek – how to punctuate dialogue
Most every story has dialogue, so its important to punctuate it correctly. Readers expect it, and they use the dialogue punctuation to help them figure out who’s speaking. If you forget the following rules, the easiest way to remember how to do this is to grab your favorite novel, open to a page that has…
Read MoreGrammar Geek – Passive vs. Active Voice
Passive vs. active voice is something that writers talk about often but what is it? Essentially, it refers to what part of your sentence has the action. Let me give you an example. Imagine your friend, John, just walked into the room and thrown his pencil onto the floor. You have two “players” in this…
Read MoreResearch- Decide, Record, and Cross-Check
A wise user of the internet once said “Writing is a funny thing. At one moment, you’re writing. The next, you’re looking up the average snowfall in Edinburgh.” Writing research can be a delicate task, especially when you know your Google searches may just get you on some sort of government watch-list, or at least…
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