by Pernickety Kate | Mar 7, 2022 | Editing, Words, Writing skills
In earlier posts, I covered dialogue punctuation and layout in fiction and memoir. But what about the things the characters actually say? Sounding natural A mistake often made by fiction writers is to think that ‘natural dialogue’ means including everything a speaker... 
by Pernickety Kate | Jun 2, 2021 | Editing, Proofreading, Writing skills
In How to write dialogue: 1, I explained how to punctuate written speech. (The fact that it took a whole blog is a measure of how complex it can be.) You should be comfortable with most of those ideas before reading this blog on layout – or at least have the other... 
by Pernickety Kate | Sep 28, 2018 | Editing, Words, Writing skills
Everybody’s different. We can see people’s uniqueness in their clothes, their hairstyle, their accent, their hobbies or pets. And that individuality extends to their writing. I currently have an editing job involving lots of technical documents, destined to be part of... 
by Pernickety Kate | Apr 10, 2018 | Editing, Writing skills
At some stage, you may be asked to write a press release for a local newspaper – maybe to promote an event for your organisation. Newspaper editors will usually require a press release to be in the same style as the rest of the paper. Well, it makes sense to keep on... 
by Pernickety Kate | Mar 6, 2018 | Editing, Proofreading
Proofreading and editing are jumbled up in many people’s minds as “something to do with writing”. If I say I do both, then one of the first questions I’m asked is: “What’s the difference?” You might think that a proofreader checks for mistakes, and of... 
by Pernickety Kate | Feb 15, 2018 | Editing, Words, Writing skills
“Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!” Even when not watching Cabaret, we’d all be happy to be greeted with these words, wouldn’t we? Such harmless pleasantry – what could possibly be wrong with treating customers like this? Well, in some contexts, nothing at all. At the... 