Posts by Neil
I agree with Lauren's answer: You need highs and lows in any story. As long as you're not boring the reader, maybe these excerpts are just low points. But momentum counts for an awful lot, and it...
A rambling narrative can be executed very badly or very well. Maybe it's tool to give color and depth to a world, but it can simply be a sign of an unfocused book. In all cases, what's important is...
Writing a story in which math plays a pivotal role when you know little about mathematics would probably be a mistake. There is, unfortunately, no way to fake knowing something. You either have to ...
The best way to expand your vocabulary is to read a lot of books with unfamiliar words in them, experiencing them in context. However, there are ways to make this easier: Seeking out relatively m...
Yes, research is worthwhile - to a point. This is difficult to answer because you're asking people to make a value judgment about how worthwhile research is. My opinion is that if your story is ba...
Nobody is perfect, not even proofreaders. But first, let's get some terminology straight: Copyediting is a catch-all term for editors who revise, make changes and suggestions, and so on. Of cours...
It's absolutely okay to leave these out. You'll be making the text more concise and the reader will have less work to do. The only time you want to use tags like "I wondered", "I thought", "I worri...
General in-text citations like Lauren suggests will almost certainly be sufficient, particularly for a short, informal paper. However, if your paper is longer or a more formal paper (for example, a...
While I don't know of any straight dictionaries that organize words by number of syllables, many rhyming dictionaries will organize rhymes by how many syllables they contain, or by how many syllabl...
You're essentially asking if it's possible for a human being to be unbiased. The answer is no, it's not. Even in the case of professional manuscript evaluators working for total strangers, there is...
Asking general questions about writing is useless if the lessons learned aren't put into practice. I agree that we need a section for manuscripts. Talking about writing in a hypothetical sense is...
Let me see if I've got this right: You've got two characters who are telling you what to do (or what not to do). And you think that's a problem? Writing believable characters who want to write th...
The postscript is indeed of limited use, but it might still be useful when one has something else to say, but doesn't want to compose the email all over again. People still do compose letters fro...
Here's the perspective of an editor who does some writing on the side: It depends on what you need in a dictionary. When editing UK writers, I usually use Cambridge, I think I'd continue to use t...
"Intellectual" often means a labyrinth of language. (Try reading any doctoral dissertation.) Try this instead: “The universe changes gradually, from one condition to another, without any abru...
Just from the information you've provided, it seems you're creating a convoluted and potentially confusing situation for no good reason. If, however, this is important to the story, you can always ...
Book layout is a very specialized field. If I were writing a book of my own, I'd save up the extra money for a layout person, particularly if the book had a lot of tables or illustrations, or if it...
Have you ever read a few words, or heard a description of a plot twist, and thought, "that sounds like something thus-and-so would have come up with"? We all have, and that's because the writers we...
More detail about why you have this dilemma would help, but I can answer this question in a general sense. I'm assuming you're writing fiction based on the historical setting of World War II Europe...
There's no universal standard for this, or at least not in fiction. Books generally pick one style and stick with it. Larger narrative breaks than a section break can be indicated by starting a new...
Just because a shift in expression or body language happens quickly doesn't mean you have to describe it quickly. You could expand the above to something more descriptive. For example: C1 doub...
Using first person might work best for a situation like this. You'd be able to easily convey inner thoughts, use quotation marks for strictly dialog, and have the option to format intruding other "...
I don't think it matters what your state of mind was when writing; if anger motivates you to write, then why not use that as a muse? What matters is whether the finished work is any good or not. ...
In a very general sense, the publishing process for new writers works something like this. This is not comprehensive: there are alternate routes, and there are always exceptions! 1. Author writes...
While it's difficult to say without seeing the writing in question (and the editor's comments), I've tried to answer this in a general sense, assuming the editor in question is reasonable and can b...
