I have maybe two or three albums that I can honestly say I like in their entirety. Most of the albums that I own have a few good songs, but there’s always that one song (or two, or seven) that gets skipped any time I hear its opening chords. Even with albums by artists that [...]

photo credit: jez`   
Last time, we talked about the importance of getting your work critiqued . Hopefully, you have taken that first step — but now, you may be wondering what to do now that your work is all marked up. The next step is revision — by which, I don’t mean changing a word [...]

We all have them in our lives: the excellent fodder for characters in our fiction. Maybe it’s your Aunt Sheila who’s flat broke and still charges designer shoes by the ton, or your high school boyfriend who tragically broke your heart after the big game, or your father who abandoned you and now hits you up for money.

The purpose of getting critiqued is not to get meaningless flattery; you need to use it as a tool to get honest, helpful feedback so that you can find out what’s working and what isn’t.

Aspiring novelists are always intimidated by the classics, especially when it comes to writing the opening of the novel.

The truth is that there are many kinds of these informal phrases floating around; they’re not all the same thing, and they’re not always bad. Two main types of these phrases that are often confused and mishandled are idioms and colloquialisms.

Americanisms are special phrases that are unique to U.S. culture.

There are two main forms of title capitalization: sentence case and title case

The pronoun “I” is subjective, meaning it is always used as the subject of the sentence or clause. The pronoun “me” is objective; it is used to receive action from the subject or to be the object of a preposition.

Good writers use the right word; clumsy writers use adverbs to bolster up the wrong verb.The right verb is not just concise, it pops at the reader, conveying just the right meaning.