When was the last time you read a draft that was littered with # symbols? I’m guessing it looked like a mess. It might have been a messy markdown document with broken headers, a social media caption crammed full of tags, or a project management log filled with ticket IDs. To the naked eye, they’re […]

Panic descends when you’re done writing up a long piece or a chapter. Ready for victory, you sit down…then you read it, and see pattern you didn’t mean to create. Your prose are choppy. The sentence rhythm doesn’t feel right. Something isn’t quite right, and yet you can’t quite put your finger on it. What’s […]

If you’ve written a single paragraph in an edited manuscript or even an academic paper, you’ve probably done this. The sentence starts with one pair of parentheses. Then another thought creeps in with another set of brackets to explain something else. Before you know it, the sentence is crumpled up like a ball of twine […]

A little dot makes a big difference. A colon mark the difference between reading a database and reading prose. You may be able to craft a coherent sentence, but when most of them begin with a colon and a label, they stop being words for the reader. They become rows. And this change happen at […]