Tag Archives: writing tips

Writing Room: Making Friends with the Passive Voice and Its Cousins

Passive sentences can be wordy and vague — or useful. For me, a passive sentence is one that — for better or worse — obscures the doer of the action.

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The Writing Room: Writer’s Block and the Toxic “Reader”

The key lesson I learned about writer’s block from Jane Anne Staw’s book, “Unstuck,” is how important it is to imagine a friendly, supportive reader as I write.

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The Writing Room: To Niche or Not to Niche?

Where’s my niche – spiritually, philosophically, politically? As a writer? For a writer, nichelessness can be a problem. I’m a hopelessly open-minded, doubting, wondering, yearning skeptic who senses the Holy at work in all sorts of people — Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists.

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Writing Room: The Punch Line Always Goes Last

Everyone knows that the punch line goes at the end of a joke, not the beginning. A mystery writer knows to set the story up and get all the necessary events and clues in place before revealing that the pizza delivery guy did it. The same is true of a paragraph and a sentence.

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The Writing Room: Is Less More? Or Is More More?

What’s wrong with this sentence? “It was a letter from my lover; my heart thumped, my stomach sank, my breath stopped, and my hands shook as I opened it.”

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