What Are Your Verbs Doing? Do you remember back in primary school when the teacher said verbs were ‘doing’ words? Doing words? What’s a doing word? A verb is a doing word. Let’s take a closer look at these overactive words. A verb is a part of speech (one word or a group of words) that shows some sort of action being done with or to the subject of a sentence. Essentially there are three main typ...

9 Tips to Getting Published You’ve written your story and now you want to send it off to a publisher. But is your story ready to be sent off? To increase your chances of getting published the following tips should help get your story ready for publication: A good title can help catch the editor/publisher’s eye; Always include a beginning, middle and an ending in your stories; Edit for clarit...

Sentenced for Life: Structure it Right As a new writer, you may be faced with a unique struggle – you know what you want to say, but not how to say it. The ideas are there – but not the structure. As you become more comfortable with your craft, you will also enhance your knowledge of the correct use of grammar in your work. It is often difficult to learn how to use correct sentence structure in y...

Let Your Characters Speak for Themselves “As a writer, one of the first lessons you learn is to show not tell your story. One of the most effective ways to do this is by using the dialogue of the characters to move the story along.” The editor said to a young writer he’s just met at a conference. “The key to any good fiction story is how compelling the characters are and by the use of dialogue to...

The Finer Points of Punctuation Perhaps the best way to illustrate the importance and effect of proper punctuation is to imagine reading a piece of writing without it. Supposing you were to read this entire article – all 900 words of it – with absolutely no punctuation. Not just the obvious periods and commas, but no colons, dashes, exclamation marks or question marks. Punctuation hasn’t always ...

Title Your Short Story Right No matter how fantastic the short story you have written may be, without a catchy title the chances are good that an editor will not read it. The title is the most important part of the story as this is what first captures the reader’s attention. A good title should grab the reader and make them wonder what the story is about. A bad title will probably cause the read...

Get the Write Edge Take a look around your workplace. Do the leaders in your organisation write effectively and powerfully? Do good writers tend to get promoted? Do people tend to listen to good writers? Are good writers able to persuade or convince effectively? Absolutely, yes, yes, and yes again! More and more of our work today is undertaken through writing rather than in person or on the phon...

Practice, Practice, Practice  It may sound silly but the key to self-confidence and building more self-esteem is through practice. Practice what it is you want to feel more confident about and eventually, the confidence will show itself. That makes sense if we’re talking about a skill like playing the piano. With enough practice, you naturally begin to get good at it and then you feel more confid...

Storytelling – the inherent power of success Would you believe me if I told you that you already have the power to succeed? It’s latent and just waiting to be tapped into. It’s relatively easy to learn and it reaps rewards that help you throughout your lifetime. It is also one of the skills that never becomes outdated or even useless but one that only becomes better the more you practice. What is...