Monthly Archives: July 2013

And finally, commas

Commas and compound sentences I would not even go into this, but one of my thesis students told me that he didn’t know it (after I’d spent 2 years assuming he was making a stylistic choice).  Compound sentences are linked … Continue reading

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Punctuating. “Dialogue.” Also, Adverbs

Further guidance for my students, who are struggling with the technical aspects of dialogue, though they might not know it. Where to put those tags Dialogue is often better broken up with dialogue tags than ended with them.  That is, … Continue reading

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“Stop using those strange dialogue tags,” she chided (exclaimed, exhorted, quipped, chirped, opined).

(Also, could you punctuate them properly?) This is something that exercises any number of people.  Here, for instance, is number 3 in Elmore Leonard‘s “ten tips for writers“:  Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line … Continue reading

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Point of View (seemingly endless) notes for my students

This is a very long email I sent to my students last semester, when a few had questions about point-of-view.  There are occasional references to particular students and particular stories, but I thought the specific advice might mean something even … Continue reading

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Some (Old) Guys: J. M. Coetzee, David Grene

 Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man? When David Grene died, at 89, in 2002, Douglas Martin said of him, in the New York Times, that his “translations of ancient Greek spoke with such clarity that the writer … Continue reading

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