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Yes, it constitutes a lie, technically speaking. Yes, it is legal. The use of pseudonyms is an established practice in publishing. There's a wide range of reasons where writing under a pseudonym m...
Allow me to introduce you to Scrivener. Scrivener is a word processor which allows you to create unlimited documents within a single project, and organize them into folders. You can have each b...
Per the discussion in the comments: if you're using sentence case, I'd go with 4-terminal (lowercase T) because the 4 is the first character. (I would still flinch to see a sentence which started...
You can always have a character who doesn't develop; flat Disney villains come to mind. But the flat character is generally in opposition to the hero/ine, who does develop. So the question is, wh...
It is possible. How, I know not, but it is possible. I once wrote a story that was literally a narration of events with no character, and the community (it was a fan fiction) really liked it. I sti...
I am actually adding a second answer based on something @user16583 mentioned. In some long-running comic strips, characters don't age or change. Strips like FoxTrot and Sally Forth occasionally m...
No, because the dash (which should properly be an M-dash, like this — ) is an interrupter. You can use it at the end of a broken-off phrase, or if a sentence is interrupted, but you need some kind ...
The reason you think it's obvious is that you assume that only a woman would be having a romantic dinner with a man. Your baseline assumption is that everyone is straight. There is absolutely nothi...
Hyphens indicate a compound adjective: a do-it-yourself project. The hyphens are to let the reader know that all the hyphenated words belong to one thought. If you're using capitals to denote a pr...
Yes, if you have two POV narrators in the same section, you must at least put her POV in another paragraph. Think of it as similar to speech; if you'd put a new speaker on a new line or in a new pa...
I believe you need a nonbreaking hyphen. It'll keep the characters before and after it from breaking across lines. From Butterick's Practical Typography: Your word processor assumes that any...
Books of the last, say, 75 years are set in what's called in medias res, in the middle of things. The story starts where the plot starts, more or less. But back in, for example, Victorian novels, ...
Unlike @what, I often enjoy the extra material, particularly if you have it set up as a chapter interstitial or a page or two of introductory material before a chapter gets underway. It allows the ...
I would only capitalize "the Assault" in this context if the people involved are imbuing the event with such importance that there can only ever be one assault in their lives. It's THE assault, so ...
I much preferred reading the first-person excerpt, but that doesn't mean much when taken out of context like this. There's no simple answer here. First person has certain advantages, third person h...
Something may be a one-time event, but that doesn't mean it's capitalized. I would refer to "the assault" throughout unless you're using the book's title. "The assault that takes place in The Assau...
I would think yes, since "in order" is a bit superfluous, but there are always exceptions in context. You can probably take it out most of the time (like 85 to 90 percent).
My original thought was "Of course a good headline can have a pronoun," but wow, a bit of research shows having any pronouns in headlines is actually quite rare. NY Times: Moving Your Show to Bro...
If you can't boil down your novel into a logline (or "elevator pitch," which is how I learned it), then you may actually have a problem with your novel. You've provided the structure of your answe...
Since we don't have the sample text that was analyzed, it's hard to answer this question in any specific sense. But I'd guess that this overuse of prepositions is actually the overuse of prepositio...
To start with, you have too many invented terms without definition all in a row. Hearthsoul, assassin pouches, luck fairy? You also have enough mistakes that I really can't tell if some of these t...
Consider something like the following: ... has only been thoroughly evaluated by a small number of experts in the xx literature, the most significant of which are (author1992, author1994, ...)....
Similar to Dale, I'd use square brackets and color the word magenta. The magenta is a crossover from my design job, where anything in magenta is placeholder text. Magenta in a writing context would...
The best advice I can give you is to find actual ESL speakers and listen to them. If you can find an ESL class in your area, talk to the teacher. Ask permission from teacher and students to audit a...
Would it count as "previously published" if it appeared in your (print) newspaper, but it was three years ago and nobody is likely to still have old copies lying around? This seems like an analogo...
