Thanks to Eric K. Auld... 1. A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves. 2. A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave. 3. A question mark walks into a bar? 4. Two quotation marks “walk into” a...

Making time to write is hard when you're a stay-home parent. My own kids are teenagers—busy, busy teenagers with jobs and social lives and cell phones and their own agendas. If I wanted to work on a novel, they’d probably be thrilled to have me out of their hair. But...

Many people go into freelance work with wide-eyed optimism. Freelancing. Emphasis on the free. They imagine the freedom of setting their own hours, grabbing the laptop and jaunting off to work in a trendy coffee shop, being their own boss, enjoying more leisure time,...

One of the joys of reading short stories or novels is being transported into a different life, a different country, a different perspective. But when an author inadvertently makes his or her presence suddenly known, it’s jolting for the reader to be jerked back into...

It’s clear why writers should use an editor if they’re planning to self-publish a book. If they don’t have their manuscripts edited, their work will be published as is—typos and all. Writers who plan to self-publish can either hire an independent editor, purchase the...

One of the most common errors I see in manuscripts is comma splicing (also called run-on sentences)—a grammatical no-no. Comma splicing is the use of a comma to join two independent, complete sentences that can stand on their own. (I wrote a sentence, I used a comma...