If you are (or want to be) a credible writer, hopefully your sentences are free of spelling, grammatical and punctuation mistakes. No one will take your website seriously if you write like you’re texting a message. With that in mind, please check the last five comments that users have left on your blog. Do any of them meet the level you set for yourself? Even on the writing sites I follow, the comments are poorly written, sometimes so poorly that they reflect poorly on the website. Even intelligent comments are often hidden behind grammatical nonchalance. Here are some suggestions.

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You should only use the word “insure” if you’re talking about buying or selling insurance policies. The word “ensure” should be used when you want to guarantee an outcome. For example, “please ensure that you don’t make that mistake.” Unfortunately, Fox News hasn’t gotten the memo…

Fox News: “We expect Russia to insure that all lines of communication and transport, including seaports, airports, roads and airspace, remain open for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and for civilian transit,” Bush said.

No, Fox, no! You will rot in the deepest, hottest bowels of grammatical hell. Devils will stab you with semi-colons until you beg for death’s sweet embrace.

Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, spoke at my workplace when he came to Washington in 2006.  Sadly, the only thing I remember about his appearance was that I got to work within a few feet of a Secret Service agent.

B. Mac reviews and revises the titles of 30 manuscripts submitted to a writing workshop. This will help you evaluate and improve your titles.

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If you have a list of links in your sidebar or site-map, test the links once a month.  It amazes me how often we change the permalinks without updating the sidebar.  The monthly link-test is easily the most productive minute I spend on website design. 

We board the plane at 3 pm. Everyone is fully sane.

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From Wired.com: “Thomas Edison, never shy about exploiting a situation to his advantage, especially if it could cripple a rival, therefore built the electric chair to operate on alternating current [the preferred system of his rivals]. By associating the Tesla-Westinghouse current with something as unpleasant as capital punishment, Edison hoped to turn public opinion his way. He even suggested replacing the new coinage, electrocution, with ‘to be Westinghoused.’ It never caught on.”

That invented use of “Westinghouse” is brilliant. Which words could you repurpose for your fiction?

If you ever come across one of these words as you rewrite, please replace it with something more specific and spicy.

1. Good
2. Nice
3. Alright
4. Well
5. Mean (adjective)
6. Interesting
7. Vivid (hat-tip to anonymous commenter)
8. Of course (hat-tip to T3knomanser)
9. Smart (hat-tip to Jacob)

Did I forget any words you love to hate?

Mary Sues are characters that are overpowerful, self-insertions of the author. This article will help you identify and fix some of the biggest problems with Mary Sues.

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Expecting perfection from the first draft will probably paralyze you. On the first draft, the most important thing is to write something and then you can turn it into a coherent, clean masterpiece later. When you’re writing the first draft, it may help to think of your job as giving your internal self-editor material to work with rather than writing a story fit for public consumption.

Here are a few suggestions to avoid perfectionist impulses during the first draft…

1) Don’t edit.

2) If you get stuck on what happens in one part of the story, summarize it in a few sentences and move on. You can fill it in later.

3) Commit yourself to writing for at least 30 or 45 minutes. After ten minutes of accomplishing little, you will hopefully start to feel frustrated and lower your expectations. “Maybe this line is good enough.”

City Journal wrote a well-researched article on the future of conservative nonfiction, but I’d like to make a larger point about political nonfiction. “Since the new conservative imprints have far less latitude than traditional nonfiction imprints to fail, they tend to rely heavily on, and largely be defined by, a handful of proven iconic authors.” It’s probably true that smaller publishers have to be wary about rolling the dice with noncelebrities. But, because of blogging, I think that it’s tremendously difficult for a non-celebrity of any political persuasion to publish political nonfiction. Readers can find blogs that offer any style of political thought for free. Some blogs are exceedingly well-written and intelligent. So why would anyone want to pay for your opinion? Because you’re someone who has an invaluable perspective because you used to be a President, a secretary of state, or are a hugely popular talk-radio host, etc…*

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Cadet Davis reviews and revises the titles of 30 manuscripts submitted to a writing workshop. This will help you evaluate and improve your titles.

Above Average

1. Evil by Choice. This one has a lot of style and markets itself well to the readers of psychologically-themed and villain-as-main-character stories.
2. Rails Across the Dragonlands. This sells a steampunk fantasy well, but it would be more effective if it gave us something to care about.

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When you try to sell your work to a publisher or readers, please do not use the word “parody” interchangeably with “comedy.” A parody imitates the style or plays on the conventions of an author/genre /work to make fun of it.  Most comedies are not parodies. There are two common reasons that authors may misuse the word parody…

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A character strikes a pose by doing anything that’s primarily designed to give readers an interesting visual. Unlike well-executed visuals, poses are usually distracting and rarely add anything like character development or immersion to the story.  It’s usually more effective to rewrite the visual to show us something about the character. For example, a character that admires his weapon is striking a pose because he’s not telling us anything interesting about himself.  You could fix that by having the character run his finger across the blade to test its sharpness. That helps develop the character as a competent and tough swordsman. In contrast, someone who just admires the weapon probably fails to show any of his own traits and is offering a visual only for its own sake.

I found these two articles on writing male speech and female speech quite useful.

I found this resource very useful to anyone that’s writing a book proposal:  What Publishers Want to See Most in a Book Proposal.

“I cannot say this often enough: if your backstory is more interesting than your current era, you’re writing the wrong story.”  — the Paperback Writer

This short article will help beginning novelists avoid another five common mistakes that will usually cause publishers to throw out a manuscript.

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We’ve added 12 articles and a new section on dialogue to our index of writing articles.

Mentor characters are usually insufferably bad.

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I wouldn’t recommend putting an animal in your title unless the animal actually features prominently in your book. No matter how obvious you think it is that Corporate Wolf is not actually about a Canis lupis, the red herring will throw off at least a few (and possibly many) of your readers.  It would probably be worth your time to take out the animal name, particularly if your book will be on a shelf with fantasy or science fiction offerings.

This article will help you write tight and effective dialogue, courtesy of Shut Up, He Explained.

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Fans of trippy science-fiction novels everywhere can rejoice that Neuromancer is getting a movie. In other good news, the movie poster shown by i09.com looks pretty stylish and suggests that it won’t be a remake of Swordfish.

The bad news is that Hayden Christensen, the same “actor” that ruined Star Wars and Jumper, is starring as Case. Dare I say that John Travolta could do this better? Egads. How could we have come to the point where John Travolta is the lesser of two acting evils? Hayden [censored]ing Christensen.

If you’re interested in writing crime-based fiction, Modus Operandi: a writer’s guide to how criminals work is definitely worth your time. For example, if your police officer were investigating the theft of a truck and the merchandise inside, the book suggests considering these possibilities…

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Describing the weather sometimes helps develop the story’s mood and can emotionally affect the audience. However, I have a few main problems with the weather.

1. Authors tend to spend too much describing the weather independent of the characters. I recommend showing the characters interacting with the weather, ideally either raising the stakes or developing the character. If you’re writing a chase scene in the rain, one character might slip in a puddle as he’s trying to get away or struggle through the winds. Your protagonist’s wedding might be moved inside if it starts hailing, but if he’s stubborn enough maybe he’d refuse to move it.

2. Mentioning the weather in the first sentence of a book is rarely effective (“it was a dark and stormy night”). Your opening sentence has to convince readers to keep going and it’s difficult to imagine weather doing that. If you’d like to mention the weather anyway, I’d recommend using it to develop the lead character. For example, your opening sentence might be something like “Private Perkins hated the rain.” That’s not a great opening, but it uses the rain to faintly suggest that Perkins is unhappy because his life is boring and dour.

3. Please use weather in unexpected ways. Publishers have seen a lot of manuscripts that use dark storms to feel foreboding, or light-and-sunny weather to feel cheerful, or rain to feel sad and moody.  When the guy finally gets the girl, why does it have to be sunny?  I think it would be more dramatic if they passionately embraced in a light hail, myself.

We have decided to take advantage of the thousands of hours we have spent reading frightfully bad submissions by compiling over 125 common mistakes into a questionnaire for first-time novelists. Give it a look!

Writers use obscenities for the same reasons they put in exclamation marks: they want to show that a character means it. Like exclamation marks, obscenities quickly lose their impact and come to sound goofy with overuse.

To help illustrate how goofy obscenities can look, we’re offering a caption contest. Abuse obscenities to create a hilariously bad conversation between Agent Black and Agent Orange. (Agent Black is the guy on the left; by the process of elimination, Agent Orange is the mutated alligator).

1. Don’t let the contraction “there’s” lure you into grammatical traps. “There’s” means only “there is,” so it can’t be applied to plural nouns. I once asked an aspiring author if he really thought that publishers would want to buy a manuscript that he was pitching as “Tolkien in space.” “There’s many reasons to think they would,” he wrote back. That statement is incorrect (grammatically and otherwise).

2. Constructions like “there is” tend to create passive, slow sentences. For example, you might write “there are five buroughs in New York City.” It would be smoother to rewrite that as “New York City has five buroughs.”

This short article will help beginning novelists avoid another five common mistakes that will usually cause publishers to throw out a manuscript.

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