The Proofreading Pulse

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.

Problems with pronouns and antecedents can significantly interfere with your readers’ understanding, so make sure each pronoun’s referent is crystal clear.

The rule for US English is actually pretty simple to state: use that when the phrase that follows is essential for the meaning of the noun (or is a dependent phrase), and use which when the phrase that follows offers additional, nonessential information about the noun (or is an independent phrase). Getting it right, however, can be complicated.

You have to pay attention to formatting and presentation when you’re getting ready to self-publish. When it comes time to self-publish your book, don’t make these five key layout mistakes.

Let’s look at how Word’s built-in ruler automates the indentation of text, along with why you should use it rather than indenting manually.

While researching apostrophe use and common associated errors, I learned several interesting facts...

Clocking in at 1,145 pages, this is not a book meant to be read cover to cover (thank God), so Chicago has a handy guide to the edition’s updates. The problem is, the handy guide is itself somewhat daunting. So I’m going to cover the top ten changes,

When it comes to the real nuts and bolts of writing, you’ll find it easier to control your tone by paying attention to your mood. I don’t mean your personal mood, as in not writing when you’re angry or texting when you’re drunk (though that is sound advice). I’m talking about the mood we establish with our words.

However it happens, we all learn to fear the aftermath, the moment when we click open the folder where we save our work and see that the file we were editing only moments ago is just . . . gone. Here's a quick-and-dirty guide to getting it back.