I regularly create media kits for authors. The authors I work with complete an extensive survey, answering questions about their background, their book’s content, and how they’d like to see their book publicized. I incorporate their responses into a press release, author bio, book recap, catalog copy, and so on.
Here is one author’s response to [...]
Yesterday, I challenged you to figure out what’s wrong with the way an author used attribution tags in her novel.
Now, let’s talk about where you should put attribution tags (said so-and-so) and how to punctuate them.
Short quotes:
Place the attribution tag at the end, so your reader pays attention to the quote itself.
“I’m feeling confident [...]
Every Monday, our Putrid Prose column features grammar, punctuation, and usage bloopers we find in other people’s writing. In the interest of fairness, I’m confessing to one of my own bloopers. On Twitter, I wrote:
About 50 new followers joined us today. Where are ya’ll coming from?
One of our followers–cyndilou-immediately replied:
ACK! Y’all is short for you [...]
Oh, those dreaded apostrophes! Writers sprinkle them here, there, and everywhere–usually, in the wrong place.
And commas? We won’t even go there.
Test your knowledge of these perplexities by playing this fun punctuation game, based on my favorite punctuation book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.
Tell us how you did!
True confession: [...]
Eye am knot the strongest speller. And when it comes to grammar Laura is a googolplex of light years ahead of me. But I try. And I make an effort to punctuate words correctly.
Since the internet has taken over the world lets peek at two of the more common words of the age: “Web site” [...]