If you’re looking to get your Christian writing published professionally, though, it’s not enough to be an excellent writer moved by the Holy Spirit; you’ll also need to demonstrate that you can stick to professional publishing guidelines and standards.

even when used properly, figures of speech and idioms, what we might generally call “poetic language,” can be inappropriate for academic writing.

Quotes from outside sources are useful and necessary in research papers. If your paper includes a literature review in which you discuss your field’s relevant literature, you will use quotes to add clarity and precision to your summary and analysis.

Today, seeing as artists come in all manner of genders, and not many of us are Greco-Roman pagans, we can replace “female” with “Other” and “goddess” with “free agent” and see the Muse as very much alive and well in an artist’s life.

The physical sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, genetics, biological sciences, astronomy) often rely on CSE referencing, a style created and updated by the Council of Scientific Editors.

The whole point of grammar is that the audience shouldn’t have to guess at what you’re trying to say. Missing vocative commas deeply change the meaning of their sentences,

Titles come in many shapes and sizes, but they all have rules for formatting that you master with just a little work. Italics, quotes, even plain text: they all apply in certain situations. How do you know which is which?

Conversation is often more about phrases than words, to the point where we often use the phrases without thinking about the individual words at all.

Adverbs are modifiers used specifically to explain, describe, and define the way actions occur. They’re very simple things, which obviously means that using them can get complicated. Following these ten tips should help.

I spend a lot of my editing hours at ProofreadingPal dealing with wayward italics, so let’s talk about times when they are used properly and when they aren’t.

Let's talk about two marks that set off complementary information, phrases and clauses without which a sentence is incomplete: the colon and the semicolon.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.