If you’re like me, you’ve got a pile of incomplete books on your read-it-later list. These digital ghosts are lingering evidence of good ideas that went bad at chapter 40. We tend to view the impulse to quit a book as an act of impatience or a moral failing, which can make you feel anxious. […]

Quotation marks is small, but they matter. They open and close dialogue. They enclose titles. They signal irony. Incorrect use of quotation mark trips up the reader. Unclosed quotes send you lurching into following paragraph without warning. Missing openers leave character spouting out of thin air. These mistakes goes undetected by the average reader, yet […]

The reason Roman numerals seem to stand the test of time: They appears on royal regiments, movie credits, and clock faces. But as a writer, they can be confusing. Sure, we all intuitively grasp that IX = 9 and IV=4 but applying them is another story. Different sources has different rules for combining Roman numerals. […]

Hyphen: “Hyphens? They’re those little dashes that join words.” You might paste text from a formatted document into your manuscript, at which point you discover why the text is filled with invisible problems. Punctuation so tiny it’s hard to spot are the difference between readable prose and gunked-up copy. Consider common problem of line breaks […]