As writers, we spend a lot of time alone, pouring our hearts onto the page. But if we want to produce the very best work that you can, this isn’t enough. To truly make our work the best it can be, we need fresh eyes. We need to show our work to others willing to pick up that loathed red pen and critique our writing.
There are all kinds of words that seem to pop up in your story while you’re writing the first draft. They can make your writing sloppy, cause confusion, and take up space, sometimes all at once. Some call them “filler words,” others “weasel words,” or any other variation of the term. I think we can all agree, though, that these words are tricky and must be destroyed. But how do you identify these words?
Improve your metaphors and similes with this simple tip.
Grammar is a funny thing. In the English language, there has been a great deal of evolution, both in words and in structure. Any Google search for “words we don’t use anymore” will come up with lists of vocabulary that no one has spoken since Matthew Crawley’s car wreck (spoiler alert).
As much as I may rage about using “proper” grammar, I also have to admit grammar itself undergoes major transformations, and there are two schools of thought about how to react to these changes: prescriptivism and descriptivism.
Anyone who has been following The Write Practice since day one knows how I feel about the semicolon, sentence structure, spelling, and other grammatical foibles. If a writer lacks any of these things in his or her work, it drives me crazy. I’ll start railing on about the destruction of the English language, the dumbing down of society, blah blah blah.
But why would any writer care about what I think?
How do you write something that makes your readers cry? Something that sends chills down people’s backs? Prose that explodes in your readers’ imaginations?
How do you write books that sing?
The fact is you don’t write books that sing. It’s impossible. Instead, you edit them until they sing whether they want to or not.
