In my continuing quest to define the essence of writing style, I have asked a good author-friend, Gary Henry, for his thoughts. Gary’s novels American Goddesses and Rogue Goddesses cross a number of genres. They features superheroines and spies, a little sex, a hefty dash of romance and lots of action. Combining these genres takes — well, a lot […]
Writing fiction is different from writing non-fiction. It’s harder. With non-fiction, you may answer a need: “How to hammer nails straight,” or “How to deceive yourself into believing that this diet will actually work next week.” In fiction, however, it’s completely up to the writer to make the reader need to read the content. And […]
There are a few things about punctuation that drive me up a wall. They’re tiny little mistakes, more violations of convention, really, and they don’t interfere with understanding the meaning of a text. But correcting them is so easy to do. In order to maintain your image as a communications professional, remember these finer points […]
Here’s something that bugs me: sentences constructed as “this needs to happen.” For example, on a news report about the lack of mental health care workers in Nunavut, the journalist said “more nurses need to be hired in Nunavut.” That’s obviously false. Maybe nurses do need to be hired. Professionals need jobs. But that’s not […]
My Temporary Life Martin Crosbie, 2012 This was so good. The traditional publishing model is broken indeed if a string of publishers rejected Martin Crosbie’s excellent first novel. I can’t imagine what made them turn it down. The plot is engaging from the beginning, filled with grabbers like high-school bullying and drunkenness and a strong […]
Writing is less about putting words on a page or screen than it is about putting thoughts in order. Our job as writers, as professional communicators, is to clarify the world and ideas for our audience. That means illuminating—showing something that was hidden before—and simplifying—sorting out ideas, phenomena and events that are tangled and difficult […]
There are some errors that drive me crazy, not because they’re so terrible — anything can be corrected — but because they appear so frequently, and they’re really so simple that it’s hard to imagine how people make them. “Lightening” for “lightning.” People who should know better make this mistake all the time. Even some […]