The Writer's toolbox - creative writing tips & hints.

[Mantaspook]

Please use this thread to pass on any hints & tips to the other writers, these can be techniques you use in your writing, or ones that other writers use that strike you as being effective.

 

Basically, if it’s anything to do with The mechanics of writing, stick it in this thread!

[Mantaspook]

Punctuation : What’s the point?

 

OK, lets start with some basics, those little punctuation squiggles that look insignificant on the page are very important, without them the meaning gets lost, use them incorrectly and the result can be chaotic.

 

For instance, if I was to say “I hate vain people; like you, I find them detestable” then the person would probably agree, but a slight alteration to the punctuation and it becomes I hate vain people like you; I find them detestable” – and we have the spark for a good argument…

 

Or imagine the history book that omitted a full stop in this sentence: ”Charles the first walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off”

 

A nice easy one for you there, the full stop should be between TALKED and HALF.

 

The next one is a bit more difficult.

 

What is, is; what is not, is not; is it not?*

 

(For the answer, highlight the sentence with your mouse, all will be revealed.)

 

The point is this: you can clearly see that we need accurate punctuation to express on paper what is intuitively easy with speech. Even famous authors struggled with punctuation; George Orwell disliked Semi-colons so much he wrote an entire novel without using one!

 

To raise your standards of communication using the written word it is therefore essential to have a thorough understanding of good punctuation.

 

Broadly speaking, punctuation can be divided into three groups

 

UNITS OF SPACE Sentences & paragraphs

 

SEPARATORS & JOINERS Full stops, colons, semi colons, commas, brackets, hyphens & dashes.

 

SYMBOLS THAT AID THE READER Question, exclamation & quotation marks, apostrophes, italics, bullets, underlining, and asterisks.

 

In an effort to keep these ‘lectures’ concise I’ll cover these groups in a later post.

[Mantaspook]

Sentences & paragraphs

 

Every time we speak, we use sentences.

 

Sentences are easy to recognise, yet they are hard to define.

 

They should be clear, unambiguous, logical and interesting to the reader.

 

From a practical standpoint, a sentence should express a single idea or thoughts that are related to that idea.

 

As a rule of thumb, they should be complete in thought and complete in construction.

 

The sentence should lead naturally to the next one, forming a coherent, logical flow that carries the reader along. Ideally, the following sentence should carry them even further so that when the sentences are joined to form a paragraph it is done in a natural manner so that the reader is barely aware they have been joined because they are encompassing one common idea.

 

Just like I did. ^ ^ ^

 

There is enough scope in the English language to create a sentence of any size and shape, try to avoid the ‘long-winded’ sentence or ‘Gobbledegook’ like the following example:

 

The aspirations of the common man, limited, but not bound by the treaty, would have been galvanised even further were it not for the sub clause that the enlightened politicians of the technologically inferior states had insisted be included.

 

ZZZZZ… sorry, I nodded off for a moment there. Please don’t write like that.

 

HINT Write as naturally as possible, get your thoughts down on paper in a hurry if necessary, but when you examine your first draft look at your individual sentences and ask yourself “What can I take out of this sentence to make the meaning clearer?