There’s an old adage in journalism: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” If you’re writing fiction, you needn’t go that far; the details of your characters’ lives and relationships need only be internally consistent. But you are ultimately responsible for vouchsafing every aspect of your story’s world—its historical, political, natural, and technological environment—that you have not invented from whole cloth.

If you’ve ever been confused about how to capitalize disease names, read on. In today’s post, I’ll provide you with three simple, hopefully easy-to-remember, rules on the proper capitalization of disease names.

Inaccuracies creep in when we are in the heat of creation. We take shortcuts because we don’t want to break the spell. We’re writing a suspenseful scene; our killer needs to immobilize the prey. What’s a fast-acting sedative? A quick Google search throws up a name. We write it in and move on. We can always fill in the details later, we think. And then, well, frequently we don’t.

There are three articles: “a,” “an,” and “the.” All of them function as adjectives.

The English language is full of words that seem to perform the same function but have true differences when you need to be specific. In technical, instructive, and other forms of business or formal writing, “if” and “whether” serve different functions.

With school having started already some places and about to start in others, many parents and caregivers are faced with the challenge of needing to be more actively involved in their children’s education than ever.

Reconciling objective and subjective chronology might seem simpler in fiction: after all, the author controls both the clock and the perceptions of the characters. But our everyday inaccuracy in estimating the passage of time carries over to our writing.

Ah, the double-edged sword of spell-check. That little red squiggle under misspelled words can be so helpful in drawing your attention to words in need of correction. But the absence of that little red squiggle can give a false sense of security, leading you to think your writing is spelling-error free when it might be filled with correctly-spelled incorrect words. One troublesome group of word is homophones.

Our heroes live in a world, and despite all their antics, life goes on for everyone else. The sun rises and sets, the shops open and close. Keeping track of time means reconciling the activities of our characters with the big picture of our settings.

“Parallelism” means the same parts of a sentence must be of the same type. But I’m not sure how helpful that is as a definition, so let’s take a slightly longer look through a few examples.

Implicit racism is woven into the fabric of American society. It plays a part in everything, including writing. Writers may try to be inclusive and unbiased, but it can be hard to weed out bias without taking time to deeply examine language’s and culture’s meanings, bias, and oneself.

Keeping your story straight is mostly a matter of holding yourself accountable.

Civility is the world’s second-best social lubricant, and from the first day of their public appearance, cell phones have interrupted parties, luncheons, meetings, and simple how-do-you-dos.

If you find yourself in the unlucky position of writing a manual or set of instructions for how to assemble something from a bunch of other things, the following should help you understand and overcome your challenges in telling people what to do step by step.

However and wherever you find them, the right books can help improve your writing and make your home office a happier, more productive place.

No matter your motivation for blogging, you’ll want to make sure each post is high quality to keep your readers coming back. In today’s post, I’ll describe tips to make your blog more effective.

Writing is never easy; even professional writers and academics, people who have chosen careers with hefty writing requirements, can struggle mightily to get it done.

There’s no rule saying that academic articles can’t be written in muscular prose, no law that business writing can’t have a sense of forward momentum and the occasional memorable line.

Here are the top ten changes to the APA manual, selected because these are the issues professional editors are probably going to encounter most often.