Advice on Writing

I recently had the opportunity to ask January’s featured member, Karsten, for advice on writing, and she was kind enough to provide me with five excellent tips for young writers. Thanks again for taking the time to help me out, Karsten!

• Finish what you start. You learn a ton from finishing a piece: how to [...]

Writing Gooder: Clarity Through Format

Many a good writer has been ruined by reading James Joyce.  All of a sudden, the lack of punctuation and rambling sentence structure seems to become not only artistic, but desirable.
James Joyce is one of my favorite authors, but one of the many things I recognize is that I am not James Joyce.  Stuff he [...]

Writing Gooder: Passive vs. Active Voice

For today’s update of Writing Gooder, I thought I’d try to tackle the big kahuna: passive & active voice.  It’s often misunderstood, but knowing the difference and how to avoid passive voice will be a big benefit to your writing.
Firstly, what is passive voice?  Passive voice is not merely writing in the past tense.  Nor [...]

Writing Gooder; Comma Splices & Fun With Semi-Colons

I only really learned how to properly use semi-colons a few years ago.  Plus, I’m not sure if we actually ever covered it in school, but I certainly know I went a long time without knowing what “comma splice” meant either.  So it’s not much of a surprise to me when I see a [...]

Writing Gooder: Ambiguity with Modifiers

‘Writing Gooder’ is a new regular series here on the YWS Blog, taking a look at the most common writing mistakes.  For the first article, I will be going over how to use modifiers so as to avoid ambiguity.
A modifier can be a word or phrase that defines the meaning for another word or phrase.  [...]