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You have been given a precise task: To correct grammar, not style. A combination of question and exclamation mark is not a possible stylistic choice but – from the perspective of normative linguis...
Most stories in the genre start with an inception and end with an enlightenment. What exactly these entail depend on the story genre/setting you are working with. For example, I can take your spac...
Your story has to make sense, the plot has to make sense. It has to seem like the characters are making realistic decisions for their situation, with their goals. What they say and do cannot come ...
The real question is, at the end of the book is the reader going to wonder "But what about …?"? If the character wasn't especially interesting and didn't leave loose ends, then there is no need fo...
Your story is resolved too easily because no one pays a price for the ending. People face all kinds of practical problems every day and they resolve them in practical ways without much drama. Stori...
Is this considered a bad writing habit, or is it all a matter of opinion? I consider it mediocre writing. I don't think it is possible to write actual taste experiences, at best you can refer ...
As mentioned, the nature of what a Warp Drive does is a scientific possibility and considered a possible near future tech with NASA working on a similar in principle Warp Drive (in Star Trek, the W...
Eighty words isn't an essay. It's a few sentences - a paragraph or two. Enough to express one short idea, but not to develop or explore it. You should therefore have a clear idea of what it is you...
I think there are two important aspects that you should make clear: That you indeed do care about the issue. Your letter is not just a rant, you sincerely are concerned about the damage the issue...
This is perfectly fine as long as your protagonist's character arc is satisfying and complete. If someone else is stealing the show at the end, there may be good reason for that, and lessons to lea...
IN GENERAL for the modern novel, the MC is the one with a problem to solve, the MC has to take the risks, and the MC has to solve the problem. One exception to this rule I can think of is Dr. Wats...
Creative non-fiction recounts factually-accurate narratives in a literary style. It reads like a story, but it is in fact real history. It will be severely criticised for containing factual inaccur...
OP: Can all three of these character flaws be resolved? Probably. OP: Is there a general rule to determine how many character flaws can be fixed? No, it all depends on how clever you are in ...
Distance is carving off the incidental details It's not the size of the details, but their relevance to the story. In Cinderella, it matters that she scrubbed floors, and that her sisters were ug...
Poetry and Precision When I taught ENGL 100 and Technical Communication, I advised students to quote only for Poetry or Precision -- if there's no other way to say the sentence without losing deta...
As @sesquipedalias says, for a discovery writer the first draft can often be about figuring out what your novel is, what you're trying to say. You say you have story threads that you don't know wh...
Is it a good idea to leave those things to the reader's imagination? No. This is not good writing, to compare something we know to something we don't know is backwards, at best the reader will m...
The language of old hymns is often richer and more poetic than modern hymns, that may be why their language has been maintained. "Bethlem" and "o'er" seem to me like contracted words used to fit t...
Different collections of hymns have significantly different editorial policies. Many modern collections will, for example, change 'we are sons' to 'we are children' so that they conform to modern s...
My rule of thumb has always been, don't quote anything unless you are going to comment on the quotation. If all you are doing is citing an information source to support an assertion, make the asser...
I find it odd that this hasn't come up yet, so here's another alternative to the dilemma, that provides a purely technical solution: A has access to overpowered magic, right? He doesn't have to k...
If the main character isn't sure whether what they're seeing is a drug-induced fantasy or a real occurrence, perhaps the reader doesn't need to know either, at least not at first. If a character h...
Is your handwriting slow? This article claims the average speed for adult handwriting is; 68 letters per minute (approximately 13 wpm), with the range from a minimum of 26 to a maximum of 113 ...
I'm largely not a discovery writer myself, but many --perhaps most --of my favorite authors are discovery writers. It seems like discovery writers almost universally struggle with endings --for obv...
According to this guide, which uses Microsoft Word 2016 for its screenshots (but things shouldn't have changed too much for other versions), you can restart footnote numbering for each section of y...
