Even when your draft is punctuated correctly, you may still sense that something isn’t right about it. Often that’s a sentence fragment, a partial thought that goes unnoticed because it sounds like natural pause. Writers of fiction use sentence fragments to interrupt lengthy text. They can be used for emphasis. That’s less of an issue […]

If you went to high school, do you remember grammar drills? You had to identify if each sentence was simple, compound, or complex. Your teacher circle it with a red pen. It always felt like busywork. It felt like you were learning something that didn’t apply to real writing because the structure seemed too rigid. […]

Rhythm: Rhythms often leads us to believe our writing feels flat, even when grammar is impeccable. Prose has a heartbeat, and it’s found in sentences. When all beats sounds the same, the reader hears a machine reading off a list. To avoid falling into statement mode and vary one’s rhythm enough to hold a reader, […]

Counter is an auxiliary verb counter. Before helping verbs becomes a habit in your writing, Counter shows them to you. At first, one or two be-verbs or modals is barely noticeable; they simply help the sentence along. You only take notice when there’s a stack of them in a paragraph, that’s when the prose sags. […]