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I am stealing this post idea directly from Sierra Godfrey, who says other bloggers have written similar posts, so I guess I’m not the only one stealing post ideas.
BOOKS
Chicago Manual of Style, Sixteenth Edition
Although Sierra already mentioned this one, I’d be a bad editor if I didn’t suggest the […]
If you studied English in college, you probably read Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room Of One’s Own in which she states: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” I won’t go into the figurative and feminist meanings of the text, and I’m opening this question […]
I bet you had no idea the em-dash was endangered, did you? Well, when Julia Scheeres commented on my post about semicolons that she loves to use em-dashes as well, I remembered having read a tweet that said the em-dash had gone out of vogue with flared jeans and peasant shirts. I was shocked. So […]
A quick note about semicolons. I’ve blogged about them before: how to use them to connect two independent clauses and alternatives you can use instead: a period and a capital or a comma and a coordinating conjunction, or FANBOYS. But what I didn’t say was use them sparingly. It’s tempting when you learn a new […]
If you’ve been writing for a while, you’ve probably heard the expression, “Kill your darlings.” (The real expression is “Murder your darlings” and comes from Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch’s “On The Art of Writing”: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscripts […]
So here I am stuck up in the woods with no one and nothing to do but work on my book for four days. So far it’s going great except that I’m going to gain ten pounds because I have a houseful of junk food, and it’s raining too hard to go running. In a […]
I’m going on a writer’s retreat this weekend. Note that “writer” is singular because I’ll be the only writer on the retreat. We have a little house in the woods up north, and I’ve never been up there alone, but this weekend I’m going for four whole days to do nothing but write (and maybe […]
I hope those of you who are Bay Area Writers are attending readings at Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival, this week. If you haven’t yet, there’s still time! The festival ends Saturday, culminating in the super-awesome Lit Crawl during which nearly 400 writers will read their work in 60 different venues throughout the Mission District […]
When editing and critiquing submissions, the academic in me wants to copyedit every sentence until it’s grammatically and typographically perfect. That means, if I’m following the Chicago Manual of Style, I may want to add a comma before “and” in a series: “I love ice cream, cake, and pies.” Or I may want to make […]
First of all, I’m sad that Bloglines is going out of business, and I need to transfer my feeds FAST because I just got notice, and they’re closing at the end of the month. I know all you cool cats probably use Google Reader, but then I don’t think that Google Reader existed when I […]
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