The Proofreading Pulse

Two schools of thought have helped define the English lit attitude toward writing description since the Modern Period. To oversimplify, we can use Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as touchstones.

In today’s post, I’ll look at three potentially problematic issues related to quoting and paraphrasing and give tips to be successful with each.

The problem with having so many choices in punctuation is that often even experienced writers aren’t sure which is appropriate in a given situation. And indeed, the choice is sometimes arbitrary. But there are some common guidelines and conventions to help you along.

Hiring an editor isn’t about getting someone to write your paper for you, and an ethical editor isn’t a writer for hire.

The most critical part of a PhD application is the research proposal and accompanying letter. These elements explain just what you plan to do for the next three to five years of your life, how you’ll contribute to the goals and recognition of the department you’re applying to, and why, exactly, you want to do something as crazy as pursue a PhD in the first place.

In a mathematical expression, numbers, variables, and operators act like the parts of speech. Numbers and variables are nouns; operational symbols may variously act as conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, or transitive verbs.

If you’re writing on a topic in literature, medicine, engineering, history, or anything else academic, you need to use outside sources to support your ideas, and whether you get a solid A or you flop depends a lot on how effectively you use your sources.

The audience must believe a villain would actually behave that way, which means understanding and even identifying with the villain’s motivations.

The optional comma can go or not go somewhere depending on what you think works best. It sounds great, but actually, it’s grammar’s version of giving you enough rope to hang yourself.

Using terms like "uttered," "exclaimed," or "interjected" can pull your reader out of the flow of your narrative and make them focus more on the words than on what you’re conveying with those words. And let’s not even get started on "ejaculated," the biggest dialogue-tag offender of all time!

Let’s focus on the pre-writing phase of your project and how list making can be a useful method for organizing your words, and with them your thoughts

I’ve already talked about the limitations of spell check, but grammar check is actually a trickier beast, sometimes offering what look like perfectly reasonable “improvements” to your work that actually are the opposite.

Students learn that in addition to effectively applying the rules of English grammar and usage in their writing, they often must also follow conventions of a particular style guide. Style guides are primarily differentiated by their rules on documentation of sources. They also vary in terms of their formatting requirements.

When used correctly, a thesaurus can help you punch up your writing by using just the right word when you want it. Here's three times a thesaurus can come to the rescue.

In today’s post, I’ll explore the intersection of punctuation and in-text citations and the troubles that can arise.

All writing tools or techniques should help you express yourself more clearly. Lists can be particularly useful for this, especially in dense academic writing. Presenting important information in discrete items, rather than a block of text, can alleviate visual clutter and even provide a key to structuring your piece.

All too often, new fiction writers get excited by the different perspectives their characters have to offer and jump between them in a single scene. This is intensely disconcerting—whose head are we in now? What are they thinking? Why did we leave the other character?—and should be avoided.

Creating a world for your story, whether based on the real world or not, involves a series of challenges, especially when it comes to not smothering your reader in exposition. Here's a straight-forward approach to the dreaded "exposition dump."

the first-line indent, by virtue of being so ubiquitous, seems quite intuitive and natural. But there’s another kind of indent, found almost exclusively in academic writing: the hanging indent.