For non-native English speakers and young readers: If you hover over a blue word, you'll see its definition.
Punctuating dialogue can be surprisingly difficult, even for people whose first language is English. It's one of the things that you see all the time in books, but you pay little attention to, and all your English teachers assume that you already know it. Sure, if you read a lot, you pick up the basics, but even then it can be difficult to unconsciously absorb all the rules. (Until 2012, I was making heinous mistakes with commas vs. periods. I'm still weeding out errors from my novel.)
Anyhow, for the sake of my fellow spirits who be
A Writer's Guide: Believable Characters by DarlingMionette, literature
Literature
A Writer's Guide: Believable Characters
I know a lot of you out there are aspiring-writers (I’m one myself!) and sometimes we get so caught up in this “must publish!” attitude that we get lost in our stories along the way. Sometimes there comes a point when we stare at our half-finished novel and say “I’m stuck. “ Usually these moments happen when we don’t know where we’re going next with our story, and usually that’s because somewhere along the line we’ve strayed off the path and we aren’t quite sure how to get back.
One of the things that you may find helpful if you’ve never done it before is to take a reall
Publishing Resources List by SadisticIceCream, journal
Publishing Resources List
Totally overwhelmed? Start here!
Make sure you :+fav: the news article!
So you've written something freaking awesome. You've edited a million times (and if you haven't, turn around and go do that. Right now). You think you maybe want to take the leap and try publishing something. But you have no idea where to start.
Well, this is a good place to be.
This the journal where I'll be keeping a running list of all the publishing resources I find, both on and off dA. Most of it will probably be related to literary journals, since that's the stage where I'm at in my literary career, but I'll add things about book publishing as I find them.
If y
Proofreading Tips #4: Who/Whom/Whose by GoldCoinComics, literature
Literature
Proofreading Tips #4: Who/Whom/Whose
Pronouns come in subjective, objective, and possessive forms (there are more, but these are the three we shall focus on). We seem to understand this until we want to use the word "who."
Recall that a subjective pronoun is the subject of a sentence (naturally), whereas an objective pronoun is the thing receiving the verb/action ("she passed the salt to me"--where "she" is the subjective pronoun and "me" is the objective pronoun). A list of such pronouns would look something like this:I (subjective), me (objective), my/mine (possessive)We (subjective), us (objective), our/ours (possessive)You (subjective AND objective), yours (possessive)He/She
Proofreading Tips #1: Redundancies by GoldCoinComics, literature
Literature
Proofreading Tips #1: Redundancies
Have you ever thought about how redundantly we speak in every day conversation? Sometimes this passes into our writing. For graduates especially, we are unfortunately trained to add extra "padding" into our text to reach a desired word count.
Word redundancies (known as pleonasms and sometimes given the nickname of "baby puppies") are one such way. Here is a list highlighting such phrases--avoid using these at all costs:advance warningalter or changeassemble togetherbasic fundamentalscollect togetherconsensus of opinioncontributing factordollar amounteach and everyend resultexactly identicalfew in numberfree and cleargrateful thanksgreat majo
...Wow, that's a mouthful! These suckers are used to attach two independent clauses as one single sentence. Many people have confusion about when to use commas, semicolons, and colons. Semicolon conjunctive adverbs are helpful to emphasize the relationship between two thoughts (as opposed to separate sentences). Here is a list of words commonly used for this:ConsequentlyFurthermoreHoweverThereforeThenThusAdditionallySimilarlySubsequently
Some examples in sentences include:
"She arrived to school late; consequently, the teacher did not accept her homework."
"Man could not overcome the demon army; thus, the age of darkness was born."
"He forgot
Proofreading Tips #3: Indefinite Pronouns by GoldCoinComics, literature
Literature
Proofreading Tips #3: Indefinite Pronouns
Why are these important when proofreading? It's knowing when to use a singular or a plural verb. The "indefinite" part of these pronouns refers to the fact that the subject is undefined.
Many writers fall into the grammar trap by assuming that because the pronoun is referencing multiple entities, it requires a plural verb. Often it just "won't sound right" otherwise. But when these entities are referred to as a collective, a singular verb is the word you'll want to use. Examples of singular verb indefinite pronouns include:AnyoneAnybodyAnythingEachEitherEveryEveryoneEverybodyEverythingNeitherNobodyNothingSomeoneSomebodySomething
Here are some