I’ve talked about this before on the writing forum, but it warrants repeating: the inappropriate use of ‘ing’ verbs. Using gerunds, that is, words that have verbs as the root word, with ‘ing’ added to make the word act as an adjective or a noun in a sentence.

Adjective gerund examples:

The running man, the barking dog, the bathing beauty

Noun gerunds examples:

I couldn’t sleep because of the barking. He’s in the running for governor. She held up well during the bathing. Read the rest of this entry »

I was asked yesterday about developing characters.

I wrote an article about this that you can read here: How To Develop Characters When Writing Fiction Novels.

Personally, I think the biggest mistake made when someone writes about a character is making them too one dimensional – all you see of the character is what is in the writing itself, and the reader just can’t really connect with or ‘feel’ the character as a real person.

Good fiction takes the reader on a journey through their own mind, and you have to realize that all readers are going to read your writing from their place in this world – they will relate what they read to events and people in their lives, their experiences. Read the rest of this entry »

Paragraphs Are Our Friends

Since part of what Accentuate does for writers is to review web content sites and put them through their paces and report that back to you writers, I end up reading a lot of web content sites, blog sites, and article sites. One thing I’ve noticed quite frequently is that many people don’t seem to know when to break a line for a paragraph in their content. Paragraphs are important for several reasons, and if you want your writing to be the very best, it is important to know when to add a paragraph break and why.

Web content is a bit different than print items in that the reader will be viewing the content on a screen and not on a page or in a book. Many people use reading guides or their fingers or note cards to follow along while they are reading a print item, but this is nearly impossible to do on the computer without leaving unsightly fingerprints on your monitor. That brings me to the first reason why paragraph breaks are important: to make it easier for your readers to read your content without too much eye strain.

Looks Are Important and So Are Paragraphs Read the rest of this entry »