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 | Jul 7, 2018 | Numbers, Proofreading, Writing skills
Many people find numbers confusing. But if numbers are an essential part of your writing, there are ways to avoid bamboozling your readers (because you don’t want that, do you?). By ‘numbers’, I mean prices, percentages, or anything that needs counting, whether... 
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 | 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... 