Your layout isn’t simply empty paper you fill up with words; it’s a collection of active materials that includes white space. This space shape silence around the words on the page, creating rhythm. It guides the reader’s eye across document so they do not have to hunt for where one sentence ends and another begins. […]

There’s an odd blind spot that comes about if you spend long periods staring at a manuscript. The language fills in blanks. Your brain stops noticing repetition and what you read flows smoothly along. In fact, you may well be reading things many times, like passage “the morning light filtered through,” which occurs six times […]

Have you ever recieve an email that was aggressive? Maybe it had a lot of capital letters. Why does this make us feel something is wrong? The reason is because our brains processes all-caps words differently. They are signals to the eye, visual cues among otherwise-lowercase words on a page. Used well, they provide structure […]

We’ve all heard it. Write better verbs. And don’t use adverbs. On the surface of things, that’s a neat rule. But most writers does not work that way; language doesn’t work like that. If it were so simple, there’d be no point in learning about the craft of writing. It’s messier than that and you […]