Writing

Your thesaurus is a writer’s go-to tool for finding uncommon words that you hope will give a sentence a lift. Very often, you might have ten or even twenty options to replace a single word. But do you simply want to avoid repetition or impress a reader with your vocabulary? Using an extended vocabulary is…

When you want to describe smells in writing, it’s easy to feel lost for words. You can skip over it by saying something smelled good or bad, but shortcuts like that won’t connect with readers. Imagine describing arriving rain after a period of drought. It’s a delicate, sweet, earthy scent. Fortunately, there’s a word for…

I was very surprised to discover that Gen Z writers are reading my writing and publishing advice articles. Not only that, but they also represent the largest percentage of my readers. When I started writing, typewriters, notebooks, and pencils were the only writing tools, and telephones were rotary dial. Dial-up Internet modems came a long…

AI training isn’t any longer a tech experiment you read about in the news. It’s happening in real-time and probably scanning your writing right now. All your blog posts, chapter drafts, or articles you’ve published or shared online are precisely the sort of material AI crawlers vacuum up every minute of the day. I know…

You always want to improve your writing or workflow, and free cloud writing apps can be a tempting and productive idea. At first, you might think you have found the perfect tool because it has a great interface, cloud storage, and comes with a few handy little features; and all for free. After some initial…

Writing with perfect grammar is so easy now. All you need is a grammar checker, or use one of the many new AI tools to help you. In a way, this is a good thing because poor grammar is an easy way to lose a reader, and it’s so easy to avoid now. However, grammar…

An ever-present danger in writing is relying on your assumed facts. We tend to trust our memory when writing, so simple slip-ups can easily happen. The most common involve dates, geography, and historical events. Innocent mistakes with facts like these can easily happen because our memory is never 100% accurate. However minor they seem, mistakes…

Every writer knows this feeling. I only need to confirm one simple fact, and suddenly I’m ten tabs deep and wasting time. Whether I’m writing fiction, nonfiction, online articles, or essays, getting the facts right matters a lot to me. Even minor details can quietly change how convincing my writing feels. I’ve found that reliable…

While the words may sound almost the same, an epigraph and epigram are different. They usually appear at the beginning of a book or novel, similar to a dedication page. An epigraph is a short text to set the theme or mood, but an epigram is often a satirical or clever remark. They are not…