Writing

What’s the novelty effect for writers? It’s a way of looking at your writing in a fresh, new, or different way. Writers tend to be creatures of habit. We do everything the same almost all the time. But changing your writing tools or routines can give you a new perspective on your writing. Simply making…

New writers face a learning curve for the many facets they need to master to write well. It takes time to understand the writing craft and learn how to structure a story, an essay, an article, or a poem. But the more you write, the better you become as you come to grips with grammar,…

Hyphens in writing are an essential punctuation point. However, using hyphens can sometimes be a little confusing for new writers. But knowing when and how to use them correctly is not as challenging as it seems. There are many uses for hyphens. However, most difficulties arise with permanent and temporary compound adjectives. When you use…

The origin of the idiom to vent your spleen dates back to Hippocrates in 400 BC. The belief endured until the nineteenth century that four bodily fluids controlled physical and mental qualities. Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile were called humours. The word humour, or humor in US spelling, derives from Latin, meaning liquid…

There are so many fantastic writing apps for iPad now. If you like to write on the move, it’s a winning combination. You don’t need to carry around your laptop because any iPad, even an old one, has more than enough power and memory for writing apps. It’s possible to write with the on-screen keyboard.…

You can find so many writing rules that it can become a little confusing. I could probably list a hundred or more. But, as with all things, it’s always best to keep things as simple as possible. You can develop a routine if you have a short set of guidelines to remember and implement for…

With every sentence you write, you need to choose the correct verb. You can choose between a strong or weak verb or an active or static verb. Often it depends on collocation and an expectation of which verb will suit your sentence the best. As with all aspects of writing, you are the decision-maker. Can you…

New writers can easily believe the many myths about writing and writers they might read online. However, some of them are offering terrible writing advice. Others may be untrue or are at least stretching the truth. If you are a new writer, some of the advice you read can affect your confidence. Writing and publishing…

Every writer needs to know how to rewrite a sentence. It’s always part of editing to add variety to your writing or make certain elements more precise or powerful. It’s not quite the same as paraphrasing because that can be when you take words from another source and turn them into your own words. Rewriting…

Embedded questions, sometimes called indirect questions, are easy to use when you want to add more variety to your writing. We use them to change a direct question into a statement form. Indirect questions, which are also called polite questions, are one form of embedded questions. But you can use other forms to convert a…