From Rick: I’ve previously talked about the evils of “as” clauses, and I lumped the overuse of present participles (“-ing” words) in with those. In my 3/22/2021 post I briefly touched on present participles as well and some issues with
Read moreFrom Rick: Before any of you stomp on me for the title of this post, I want to make it clear that I AM NOT ADVOCATING REPLACING “SAID” WITH OTHER WORDS as a matter of course. The purpose of this
Read moreFrom Rick: This time I’m going to wrap up my advice on analyzing your story. I certainly haven’t covered everything, but I have tried to cover most of the essentials for ensuring your story has the right impact on your
Read moreFrom Rick: So far in this series, I’ve dealt with three aspects: (1) your story’s purpose in terms of what you want to convey to your reader (2) keeping the reader with you in terms of understanding the characters’ motives
Read moreFrom Rick: Back in May of 2019, I did a post called “Tips from the experts” wherein I pulled out what I considered the best advice and provided a link to the full article I quoted from. Here’s the link
Read moreFrom Rick: I don’t know about you, but as a writer and an editor, I’m constantly beset with problems when dealing with compound words: should it be one word, two words, or a hyphenated word? We all know that “bedroom”
Read moreFrom Rick: Last year I did two posts on story structures and had thought them to be relatively complete. However, I was recently contacted regarding the first of those two posts. The person who contacted me praised the post and
Read moreFrom Rick: Being an editor, it’s important that I keep up to date on the latest grammar and style changes in the language, particularly since it seems to be changing very rapidly. There are two authoritative references that all writers
Read moreFrom Rick: Part 1 of this topic got a bit long, and after completing it, I felt I had more to say. In addition, I was recently pointed to a review of several pieces of editing software, a couple of
Read moreFrom Rick: In Part 1, I gave you some reference articles to read regarding various story structures. Before I get started, I want to make a couple of comments: (1) I do not use any of these methods directly when
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