Grammar

President Woodrow Wilson once declared (heavens knows why) that the hyphen was ‘the most un-American thing in the world'. Observant readers will have noticed that he couldn't have said this (and no one could have written a report of his words) without a hyphen; thus perhaps proving that the President was blithely unaware of grammatical irony.  Read more

The synopsis is a strange document; it is at once the dullest, and perhaps the most important, part of the submission package. It reduces your book, your creative project, to a few lines of plain, unadorned narration; yet it allows a publisher to see the book as a whole, to get a feel for the narrative arc and the development of the plot.  Read more

I am asked this question surprisingly often. I say surprising because one might assume, most of the time, that the genre of a book is obvious. And, most of the time, it is relatively obvious; authors tend to aim their efforts at specific markets. But once in a while, you come across a book that defies simple classification.  Read more

Since the advent of home computing and the easy availability of word processing and publishing software (is it really only a generation ago?), the budding writer has been faced with a wonderland of possibilities; or a tyranny of choices, depending on your point of view.  Read more

There are times when, no matter how well you write, you need typographical support to emphasise a point. English is a wonderfully flexible and suggestive language, but it can't do everything by itself, and replacing plain type with, for instance, italics, can really help the reader to understand what's happening in your story.  Read more