J.M. NORTHUP

Another problem area I often see while reading and editing is related to commas and periods. There seems to be confusion as to how to use them with dialogue tags and action beats. Below I’ve attached a great video based on the Chicago Manual of Style as well as one of the best explanations I’ve found: This was so well

I had to weight in here because this literally drives me nuts: said is used for a statement while asked is used when posing a question. Pease stop using said with a question mark as it is NOT proper no matter what the new trends are. Question marks are punctuation used to indicated interrogative clauses or phrases. Essentially, these are

There are a few trends I notice both as a reader and editor. One is the misuse of that in place of who in narrative text or formal scripts. Before you argue – note what I actually said: in narrative text or formal scripts. This means areas of your book that is not dialogue (internal – thoughts or narrative by

It is easy to misuse words, and slang doesn’t help. Colloquialisms aside, when you are writing or editing, it is important to understand the rules, even when you intend to break them. So, what’s the proper way to use ASSUME versus PRESUME? Let’s find out… The simplest answer is this: ASSUME (a verb meaning “to suppose“): is when you believe

Often, people confuse either and neither. Since these are connected to or and nor, I decided to include these with this post, as well. My husband and I had a recent conversation where this came up. The simplest way to put this is that either is always used with or and neither with nor. Either / or is used when

Essentially, it all comes down to this: ALL RIGHT is the formal version and ALRIGHT is the informal version of the same word. As an editor and writer, I would both advise and use ALL RIGHT in omnipresence narration (when the character isn’t narrating the story) and ALRIGHT in dialogue or instances of colloquialism. With formal editing and publishing written

Grammatical gender is found in most languages though it has been mostly removed from the English language. However, there are still some remnants of it. We see this with Blond and Blonde. Grammarly does a great job simplifying this: “When describing males, you would use blond: He is blond. You can add an E to blond when you describe females: