by Zoe M. McCarthy | May 16, 2019 | Writing
image by CoilN00B Tailor Your Fiction Manuscript in 30 Days is now available. See details below. The Exercise Pick a paragraph from your first draft or even from a book. Circle the nouns,verbs,adjective, andadverbs. Circle them. Then use your imagination, thesaurus,...
by Zoe M. McCarthy | Oct 12, 2017 | Writing
Try this exercise and see if you can improve the example below containing weak words and phrases. You’ll replace them with stronger words, cut wordiness, and add power words to spice up the piece. Have fun. First, read the flavorless paragraph. The Weak Passage I went...
by Zoe M. McCarthy | Mar 5, 2015 | Writing
“Mark Twain said, ‘The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug.’ Fill your book with lightning.” — Robert Littell It’s our choice to choose the word that gives our sentence the most power in creating a robust image in the reader’s...
by Zoe M. McCarthy | Apr 10, 2014 | Writing
“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” — Albert Einstein Do many of your sentences and paragraphs end with words, such as “his,” “it,” “with,” or “was”? If yes, you’ve left your reader with a dull word. It gives him...