5 Language Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make
Language is fluid. It’s alive; it shifts. It follows humanity’s path and sometimes forges off on its own. I’m hip to all that: I really am. But within this shifting fluidity there remain some rules to...
View ArticleHis Master’s Voice
Okay, even I am too young to really remember that RCA ad, but it suits this blog post well, because I want to talk about characters’ voices in fiction. When I first started writing, a good friend...
View ArticleThe Elements of Style
As most of you know, this blog aims to go somewhere “beyond” The Elements of Style, but it’s also worth taking a look—not back, perhaps, but over, at the real, the original Elements, which has gotten a...
View ArticleLanguage of Respect
I was sifting through some old emails and trying to decide what weird planetary alignment had caused me to keep some of them when I came upon a blog post I hadn’t read at the time, but had set aside...
View ArticleLady, By Yonder Blessed Moon I Swear …
A question came up recently on an elist for writers to which I belong, and it sparked my interest. The list participant wanted to know how much vulgarity is permitted in a novel. Well, of course on one...
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