But second-person pronouns is like pointing fingers. They are like invisible hands that reach out to you, the reader, and make you feel immediately invited or obligated. When you see lots of “you” and “your,” you read something like a conversation. When those words dissapears, text seems to step back and become an impersonal report. […]

It’s easy enough: You paste a manuscript into your editor, and there it is, the dialogue looks fine. It’s clean. Ready to ship. And then you go to code view, or you export it as a plain text file. Every single quote mark come out straight. Your carefully crafted curly look are gone. It’s replaced […]

Copy-pasting a chunk of dialogue from your manuscript to your plain text editor? You’ll probably spot a few rogue characters. Whether you’re drafting in markdown, exporting files or tinkering with bits of code, this is par for the course. The underscore is a common little symbol. Depending on the context, it’s a way to show […]

When you copy text and paste it somewhere else, the punctuation seems out of whack. Maybe the quotes face opposite way. Or maybe they appear as tiny commas rather than those curvy things called quotes. Don’t blame your word processor; it’s just that there are multiple ways to type stuff out there, and they don’t […]