better writing

Passive voice should be avoided by writers

Things writers do to drive me crazy, part 3 I’ve advised against using the passive voice before. Sure, there are places where it’s warranted. (See what I did, there?) But those are rare.  To clarify what passive voice means, let’s contrast it against the active voice: Active: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy […]

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I have been reading a lot of self-published books lately. Some are excellent, some are terrible. One of the characteristics of a terrible self-published novel is a misunderstanding of how to use quotation marks properly. Fixing the quotation marks won’t turn a bad book into a good one, but a this kind of error detracts […]