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 […]

By now, you’ve likely encountered an abstract noun. It’s one of those heavy words that pull a sentence down. Nouns that ends in -ity, -ness, -ment, -tion pile on top of each other until it’s hard to remember who did what. And it’s not just a matter of stylistic preference. There’s a reason they call […]

Read a poem out loud. Where does it cause you to catch your breath? That pause is not a mistake; it is heartbeat of that line’s structure. An internal pause, or caesura, in a metrical line make something written on paper come alive. As you scan through a poem, look for those cracks, where meaning […]