Posts by Neil
Context is important, and this question is hard to answer. But I'll try. Sentence length is something that creates a rhythm in the text. For example, let's think of a situation where you have suc...
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...
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...
I know that Australian English has many spellings in common with British English, but (as with Canadian English) the two are not identical. Are there standard, authoritative dictionaries for Austra...
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...
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...
Yes, it's certainly possible that posting on the internet could lead to someone stealing your ideas. But will this actually happen? There are risks, however small, to showing your work to anyone. M...
When writing a list like this, you have several options for how you want to style the text. In business writing, such as an email, you can always format this as a bulleted list: Please send ...
Different roles call for different styles of writing, and how to phrase an email like this will hinge on whether you're a job seeker, someone who's networking, a recruiter, etc. But the techniques ...
The answer to a question of style will always be, it depends. In the example given, I'd say that the minor action disrupts the dialog, but that's without knowing the context of this excerpt. And th...
Book titles are usually placed within quotes or italicized, in order to set them apart. Which one you use is a matter of style. Assuming that your publisher has no style preference (some do), you...
There is no universal answer to this, as there are many ways of indicating emphasis in plain text. Your best bet is to read the submission guidelines of the publication that you're submitting to, a...
The answer is: It's up to you, and it depends on the context. I normally wouldn't chime in on academic writing, since we have experts here in APA and MLA, but this question seems to involve none of...
Scrivener exists, in part, to put manuscripts into standard manuscript format. The # mark it uses as the default section break is, frankly, a little puzzling to me. (Apparently this is standard for...
Introducing the protagonist later in the book is generally done when there's a large cast involved. In a situation like this, who the reader should consider the "main" character is less important. ...
From a story standpoint, you have, more or less, two choices: Recount what's come before the current book, or embed critical information in the narrative itself. The more realistic it is for chara...
No, don't hold stories back unless you have a specific reason. Unless a publication specifically asks you to re-submit a specific piece at a later time (maybe they have a theme issue planned), hold...
I've done this for brochures and other literature, and it's a bit of extra work compared to marking up a PDF with circles and arrows. But some publications have had problems with people using diffe...
Writing biographies like these for a mass audience will require that the reader understand the subject's work. This can be handled by long expository passages, or, as is more frequently done, conce...
The answer to your question is: It depends on how the writer works. This is a question that's impossible to answer in a general sense, since different writers will approach a story in different w...
Punctuation marks, like words and paragraph breaks, are tools. Overuse of any tool will make your writing inelegant, but using the proper tool at the right time will help you generate pages that ar...
There are a few ways to answer this. Which answer you use depends on what you want to achieve - something lacking in the original question. Does the work already exist and you're just trying to cat...
(Note: The current edit of this post fixes some of these issues.) Clarity of objectives It's unclear, exactly, what you want people to critique; the way the post is written implies that there wi...
In general, it's my opinion that a story should pick a language and stick to it. Even though many people speak multiple languages, having a book in more than one language means you're limiting your...
Paragraph length isn't the problem here, although the paragraphs could stand to be broken up a bit. The biggest problem here is a problem of focus and organization. A paragraph should have a fairly...
