Our editing tips over the next few months are part of a series called Dial up Your Dialogue, by Writing Your Life editor Teresa Bruce. Be sure to follow along each month for Teresa’s fantastic tips to energize your dialogue.
If you’ve ever heard Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine, you’ve witnessed the hilarity of an ambiguous conversation crafted with care. In most cases, however, you’ll want readers understanding your dialogue without confusion.
Be sure your readers can tell who speaks each line of dialogue. In the example cited in last month's Dial Up Your Dialogue editing tip, context revealed Timmy and Mom as the speakers. In a scene with more than two individuals present, vary the use of dialogue tags—he said, she said, Timmy said, Mom said—with action beats that show each speaker acting in a way that enhances the story.
We have many punctuation marks in the English language, but we use a handful most every day. Quick, name them—period, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, colon, semicolon, single and double quotation marks, apostrophe, hyphen. We also have the less often needed ellipsis, brackets, parentheses, dash, slash, and braces.
Let’s look at the exclamation mark, which appears…
Qualifiers are typically adverbs added to other words that modify the meaning, such as:
The dog was somewhat lazy.
In that sentence, somewhat is the qualifier because it gives the degree to which the dog was lazy.
Qualifiers, when used sparingly and chosen with discernment, can add meaning to your text, but when they are overused, they…
Our English language is full of words that sound the same but have different meanings, words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, and just to confuse us even more, words that sound and are spelled the same but serve distinctly different purposes. Oh my! My heart goes out to people learning English…
In his book, Getting the Words Right, Theodore Cheney says, “Seventy-five percent of all revision is eliminating words already written; the remaining twenty-five percent is improving the words that remain.” That’s a lot of words.
What is Cheney talking about? We don’t set out to fill our writing with empty words, so what are these hollow…
What do you do when you’re not sure if you should double the last letter when adding a suffix like ed or ing? Is it canceled or cancelled? Commited or committed? Traveling or travelling?
English has a general rule, or should I say, multiple rules for this:
If a one-syllable word ends in a consonant followed by…
Comma before too?
English is a living, breathing language that changes constantly. Each year new words are added to the dictionary, separate words combine to form new terms, other words fall out of favor. Likewise, rules and punctuation evolve over time with the tendency toward more informal language and less punctuation.
Case in point...the comma before too…
That is one of the most often used words in the English language and one of the most versatile. It can be a pronoun (That is my belt.), an adjective (That book is my favorite.), an adverb (The worm is about that long.), and a conjunction (I was so tired that I fell asleep standing…
Go easy on the ing words. Why? Too many ing words weakens your text. I don't mean nouns like spelling, inkling, sibling, and so forth. This issue occurs when you add ing to too many verbs—singing, walking, talking, hopping. There’s nothing wrong with an occasional ing verb form, but when it’s overused, it deadens your…