Tag Archives: punctuation

Request a Free Electronic Copy of Be Your Own Editor

Be Your Own Editor is a crash course in grammar and writing basics. It covers a wide variety of topics from common errors in punctuation and word usage, to structuring nonfiction material and essays, to developing strong characters and plausible dialogue in fiction.

Until midnight on Mother’s Day, I’m giving away free electronic copies of BYOE. Send me a note at sigridmac at rogers.com and I’ll be happy to send you a copy. Please let me know if you have Kindle so I can send a Kindle version instead of a PDF.

All I ask in return for the free version is that you review the book on Amazon. Your review can consist of a couple of lines — just a few comments.
After Mother’s Day, anyone who sends me a direct message requesting a copy of my book will receive a discount.  The regular price is $17.95 but for you it will be $15, and $5.00 for shipping and handling.  Just let me know that you heard about the book here on Freelance-Zone.
I’ll be back again on Monday, starting my new series on how to write a smashing e-mail.
Fellow writer, Sigrid Mac

National Punctuation Day

Jeffbaking

by Catherine L. Tully

National Punctuation Day was Sept. 24th, which means I’m a day late on this post, but I thought the website was interesting enough to share anyway. Plus, there is a baking contest that goes along with this that you can still enter. That’s right–bake something in the form of a punctuaton mark and send in by September 30th to have the chance to win. That isn’t something you see every day… Continue reading National Punctuation Day

Good Writers Don’t Always Get Paid

not equal

by Catherine L. Tully

I know a lot of people who are really good writers, but they aren’t all getting paid good money. I remember one writer that frequented a forum that I visited frequently. She was a better writer than I am, and she was frittering her time away writing for publications that paid five or ten dollars an article. She finally had to give up and return to the corporate world. The sad part is…if she just would have upped her markets a bit, she may have realized that she was underselling herself.

You see, good writers don’t always get paid what they are worth just because they have talent. They also have to have some drive and a willingness to take chances. Part of being a writer is taking risks. By stretching yourself, you will begin to learn your limitations…but more importantly…you will grow. Every time I got a gig at a magazine that was “out of my league” at the time, I had to work harder to make the piece shine. And I improved every time.
Continue reading Good Writers Don’t Always Get Paid

Paradigm: The Best One-Sentence Advice All Week

I’ve just discovered Paradigm: The Online Writing Assistant. What a great site! It’s chock full of excellent writing help for new and intermediate writers, including the most helpful one-sentence quote I’ve found in decades:

“Focus on the sentence.”

If more writers would obsess over an individual line until it shines, they would find problem areas such as passive voice and subject/object confusion becoming a thing of the past. If your editor constantly gripes at you for putting “will be” lines in your copy or if you wrestle with past and present tense in your writing, check out Paradigm.

Even if you think your prose is dead sexy, have a look at this site and you may just discover some kind of tweak that can make your work even better.