Understanding English from the past

This is a fascinating and brief video on how English language has changed over time. Have you read Shakespeare? How much did you understand without looking up the help notes? And what about the pronunciation?

Then go back further to Chaucer. Can you still understand him without help?

The Middle English example is particularly clever. A spoken and visual rendition of a sentence most people know but it’s still almost incomprehensible in its original form.

A fun and enlightening way to spend a few minutes.

Go here to watch the video: http://writerscircle.com/cs-olde-english/


Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

How to Beat Writer's Block

A survey of 2,500 writers found that writer’s block was caused by high expectations, fear of failure, and unrealistic deadlines.

A group called Stop Procrastinating has published a list of 21 ways to beat writer’s block.
Some are obvious, like turning off the internet and breaking the task into bite-sized achievable chunks. Others are a little more off-the-wall. All of them are useful.

Here’s the link: http://blog.bookbaby.com/2016/04/21-tips-to-beat-writers-block/

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

15 words you should stop using

Career advice experts at The Muse have come up with a list of words they recommend you drop from your vocabulary. Removing these words, they say, will make you sound smarter, and your writing will be more succinct, therefore more readable.

This is great advice for writers, but also for anyone else who wants to succeed in their day job.

Some of these are words you could probably guess, like “that”, and “just” and “very”.

But others are suggestions that might make you think. Words like “absolutely”, “always” and “amazing”.

For their complete list of no-nos, check out: http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/15-words-you-should-stop-using/news-story/f3583780e617575f0d3643852aa02109

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

22 of the Best Single Sentences on Writing

Writing can be a very lonely career. Most people find themselves staring at a screen for hours at a time. Sometimes the words flow and fingers are pounding a keyboard. At other times the process is a slow one with far more thought than output.

Reading blogs, books, commentaries, research, can all be good and helpful, but it can also steal those precious writing hours.

Christopher Shultz has put together twenty-two one liners about writing by well-known fiction authors. They make great reading.

I particularly like, “Just about everything I learned about writing a good book I learned from reading lots and lots of good books” by Stephen King, and “Literature was not born the day when a boy crying 'wolf, wolf' came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying 'wolf, wolf' and there was no wolf behind him,” by Sylvia Plath.

You can read them all here: http://litreactor.com/columns/22-of-the-best-single-sentences-on-writing


Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Is “said” dead?

Recently Book Daily published a series of articles by writers about the use of the word “said”.

In the interests of full disclosure, I need to say I consider “said” the single most useful dialogue tag in fiction writing. This is because readers tend to ignore it and keep reading. That’s great news for authors trying to hook readers.
Other tags may be much more descriptive and more emotional, more arousing, more decisive and lots of other adjectives as well. But they can also pull the reader out of the story and get them thinking about the author instead of the story.

Anyhow, that’s just my opinion.

Melissa Eskue Ousley began the discussion opposing the use of “said” here: http://www.bookdaily.com/authorresource/blog/post/1771430

June Trop’s follow-up article is here: http://www.bookdaily.com/authorresource/blog/post/1819128.
There are also a multitude of comments and links attached to those articles. Go, read about it for yourself.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.