Adjectives and adverbs

Last week I was looking at web sites and found yet another one that advocated “Never, EVER use any adjectives or adverbs!” It went so far as to advocate going through one’s work and deleting all of them. So I decided to test that technique to see

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How it gets said #2: Punctuation

The workhorse of conveying tone and delivery within dialog is punctuation. Dialog certainly can follow the standard English rules for punctuation, but often it doesn’t. The differences are as much about leaving out “required” punctuation as they are about adding more or less of it than the

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Weak and Strong?

One of the bits of advice that is often given to would-be writers is “Use strong verbs.” Apart from my usual allergy to rules and generalizations, one of the things that bothers me about this is that I’ve seldom seen anyone try to explain what it means,

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Formal and informal

First off, it has been brought to my attention (thanks, John!) that I need to tell my regular readers that The Far West is now out and available in hardcover. The e-book will be out in October, they tell me. On to the post. Back in the

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