The Craft of #Writing: Grabbing the Reader
(Beth Turnage) I’ve written posts on Quora on writing and thought I’d curate some here. You can call it laziness, but really it’s a lack of time, since ghostwriting is keeping me very busy. Really. When writing, how do you grab your reader’s attention as quickly as possible? How...
The Craft of #Writing: Brain Secrets of Lexical Density
Writing is hard. Difficult. Okay, it’s the kick in your stomach when you are working like a demon to scrape the words out of your dissolute soul.The words refuse to arrive like the A-list celebrities you invited to your party. Your characters snottily refuse to talk to you, your...
The Craft of #Writing: Beware the Adverb Nazis.
Pro-Writing Aid, an online program that analyzes your writing and gives you recommendations to improve it. As I was looking at a report on a piece it gave the number of adverbs and recommended that I remove three. I must have missed this before but I do tend to...
The Craft of Writing: 200 Most Common Words As Parts of Speech
(Beth Turnage Blog) It’s been nigh many years since the nuns at my Catholic grammar school made me memorize parts of speech at the age of seven and had me parse sentences at the tender age of ten. The funny thing is that my children never had to struggle...
The Craft of Writing: 200 Most Common Words As Parts of Speech
Two hundred words are said to comprise eighty percent of all English sentences. Here is the list broken down into parts of speech. Why? Because you should know what weapons you are hurling at an unsuspecting public. It’s been nigh many years when the nuns at my Catholic grammar...