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In last month's excerpt from my book, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, we discussed different ways to use the period. This time, we'll examine a few of the dangers of overuse. There is a major distinction between using periods heavily for a stylistic purpose (as explored in last week's installment) and overusing them, which results in poor writing. Newspaper and magazine writers tend to slip into this style, since this is how they've been trained to write. In book form, though, overusing periods is displeasing, as it creates a feeling of choppiness. With each new...

A teacher of screenwriting emailed me recently because he'd been asked to write a documentary. He didn't know where to start, and was trying to locate some completed scripts to study. While these might prove useful, I knew they wouldn't adequately convey the work ahead, or reveal important differences in the scripting process. How does one write a documentary? To explain: Fiction screenwriters have long borrowed documentary techniques, and documentary filmmakers rely heavily on the tools of dramatic storytelling. As I wrote in an earlier article, Documentary Storytelling: The Drama of Real Life, both groups need to worry about protagonists...

Trying to wedge a toe-hold in Hollywood as a screenwriter or TV writer is exhausting, frustrating, maddening, heart breaking, humiliating, confusing, and not just a little bit scary. I know. During the blastocyst period of my career, I was trying to climb out of the liquid nitrogen and differentiate into a working writer just as you are now. I knew not one soul in show business. (Not that there are too many people with souls in show business anyway.) Mennonite farmers had more contacts in the entertainment industry than I had. I was utterly bumfuzzled, consumed with the ulcer-inducing fear...

In celebration of the paperback release of Noah Lukeman's seminal guide to punctuation, A Dash of Style, The Writers Store is pleased to present a four part series of excerpts from the book. Some authors, like Camus, Carver and Ernest Hemingway, used the period frequently. Others, like Faulkner, were sparing. Why? What possible difference can the placement of a period make? Does punctuation, in general, really have enough of an impact to warrant the toil of master authors? The answer is yes. And any discussion of punctuation must begin with a discussion of the period. The period is the stop...