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How Do I…? Paragraphs
We all know what paragraphs are, and those of us who’ve been through school know how they are used in academic essays, letters, and business contexts. But when it comes to creative writing, so many beginners have no idea what to do. During my years working as a tutor, I encountered several personal and narrative…
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How Do I…? Thoughts
It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these craft posts. This time, I want answer a question I’ve encountered numerous times. How do you format a characters’ thoughts? How do you incorporate them into your story?
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How Do I…? Ellipses
Everyone knows what ellipses are, but when it comes to using them, there’s not a lot of definitive advice. The one rule that you’ll find consistently is that they’re used to indicate when and where you’re skipping over parts of a quoted text. That’s very helpful for academic pieces. For creative writing, not so much.…
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How Do I…? Dashes
This time, I’ll be discussing a particular piece of punctuation — dashes. (Yes, grammarians, I understand that there are multiple types of dashes, but I’m only referring to em dashes here.) This bit of punctuation has become my go-to whenever I’m building complex sentences and I’m not sure if commas would work. They’re a handy…
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Grammar in Creative Writing
You can think of this post as a precursor to my “How Do I” series. Those posts are all about grammar and structure. Not as in-depth as someplace like Grammarly’s blog, but they’re still among my longest posts. So I’d like to take a step back and talk about the role of grammar in creative…
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How Do I…? Dialogue
We’ve been talking about macro-level stuff on this blog so far, but I’ve yet to dive into some of the craft of writing — the wordsmithing part that all writers should know. So I’m starting this series of posts on craft. I hope this will become a regular thing. Today’s topic is dialogue. I assume…