Mine holds a different kind of weight for me than mine does. My book is something on my person; it’s something I carry around. But saying it’s mine suggest a boundary. And writers hardly ever think about the difference between those words until they notice their writing has become clogged up or defensive. If you […]

Sometimes pronouns gets knotted up and your story line breaks. Or at least I lose my place in the story. This happens when we leave a character in limbo by failing to name him (or her) and then expecting readers to keep that person in mind for the next sentence. It’s easy enough to remedy, […]

In revising manuscripts, editors tend to pay attention to things like vocabulary richness, sentence length, or word count. Pronouns? They rarely does. How to Use the Pronoun Ratio Calculator It’s a quiet hum that doesn’t register until there is a problem: maybe a character is missing three uses of a particular gendered pronoun and now […]

Sometimes a manuscript simply feels too self-centered. Everything is about writer. Maybe the writing isn’t wrong so much as off. One of the culprits here are the use of reflexive pronouns. Themself. Himself. Myself. These words has their place in clear writing. But sometimes insecure writers uses them as hiding places. They use them to […]