In today’s post, I’ll share my thoughts on another relatable lesson. Good writers follow directions! Following directions is key in most activities, especially for writing assignments, which are most often accompanied by extensive written directions.

Transitions are essential to making sense in a proposition or argument, so it’s little wonder that writers tend to get wordy with them. Transitions hold the entire proposal together, keeping your essay/report/letter/memo/dissertation from just sounding like a lot of unrelated ideas.

The event story is similar to the character story in that both deal with disruptions to the status quo. A character story hinges on the protagonist’s desire to change their position in the world. In an event story, the world itself is changing. The established order—for good or bad—is under threat. The story ends with the reassertion of the old order, or the establishment of some new order.

Whether writing a cover letter for a job application, a letter of resignation, a note to a colleague, or other professional communication, you want that letter to clearly put your best foot forward and not draw flaming red arrows to your weaknesses. In today’s post, I’ll offer tips to help you write great business correspondence.

Your internal state evolves with your external circumstances. Big life events can have a profound effect on the person you are—that is, on your character. When that job works out, anxiety gives way to a new sense of belonging; romantic disappointment resolves into resignation, and then into compassion.

MS Word’s Table of Contents (ToC) feature works quite well and is more than worth the effort, especially for long documents, as it not only updates the numbers as you edit and revise but also gives you a way to quickly navigate to different sections.

he idea story builds suspense by withholding information. The resolution comes when the hidden information is revealed. The action often follows the process of uncovering the hidden knowledge. It is the natural structure, then, for mystery stories that begin when a crime occurs and climax when the detective reveals who did it and how and for certain subgenres of hard SF, where a scientific problem presents itself and the heroes work toward a solution or explanation.

A handy chart of more English styles: CSEm IEEE, and AMA.

This quick guide to some of the most common, old-school, and occasionally forgotten abbreviations should help you stay on track.

A handy chart of the major English styles: Chicago, MLA, and APA.

Exactly what sort of payoff you need to deliver will be determined by the kind of story you’re telling. Over the next months, we’ll look in greater detail at the four story types laid out in my previous blog post. Today, we’ll consider the milieu story: what it is, where it starts, and how it ends.

Ever wonder how documents manage to have text that isn’t on your keyboard? Ever wonder what some of those things mean?

After freelance proofreading, editing, and writing and doing small-group literacy and math intervention for the past nine years, I find teaching ten-year-olds reading and writing this year a fascinating, eye-opening, and challenging experience. Reflecting on lessons I’ve learned teaching kids to write this fall, I realized that what my students struggle with is what writers of all ages struggle with, just at a different level.

In my teaching and editing experience, there are three basic thesaurus user types: EFLs, native speakers who feel their vocabulary is limited and want to “sound smart,” and people who actually know what they’re doing with this literary version of a loaded gun.

A story demands resolution. The promise of a solution to a mystery, or generally an answer to a question, is what keeps audience turning pages. There are few things more frustrating than an ending that comes too soon or too late.

In today’s post, I will write about a related topic: capitalization of medication names. The rule is simple, and it’s essentially the same as the rule for capitalizing diseases and most other things.

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.