Advice — noah lukeman

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...

In last week's installment of my book, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, we began to discuss ways that quotation marks might be misused. In this final installment, we'll examine this issue in depth, and also look at the power of quotation marks when used in context with other punctuation. In some trendy works (and classic works, too) you'll find that authors opt not to use quotation marks at all, but rather to indicate dialogue with some other mark, such as a dash, or italics, or no mark at all (not to be confused with paraphrasing)....

In last week's installment of my book, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, we discussed the power of quotation marks, their ability to accelerate the pace of a work, and to allow a break from prose. They have many additional creative uses which are often overlooked; let's examine a few of them: Quotation marks can help indicate a passage of time. Most writers just routinely use quotation marks to open and close a line of dialogue; they rarely consider the placement of the marks within a line of dialogue. For example: "I love you, don't you...

Intellectually, stops matter a great deal. If you are getting your commas, semicolons, and periods wrong, it means that you are not getting your thoughts right, and your mind is muddled. -- William Temple, Archbishop of York, as reported in The Observer, 1938 Punctuation is not only for grammarians. Nor is it only for historians, or for the intellectually curious. Punctuation is, in fact, needed most by the audience for whom, ironically, a punctuation book has yet to be written: creative writers. This means writers of fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, poetry, and screenplays, and also includes anyone seeking to write well,...

"It seems important to me that beginning writers ponder this--that since 1964, I have never had a book, story, or poem rejected that was not later published. If you know what you are doing, eventually you will run into an editor who knows what he/she is doing. It may take years, but never give up." --Joseph Hansen The best secret I can teach you about writing a great query letter is that less is more. Writers feel the need to cram their letters with information, to widen the margins, lengthen the page, even take several pages. They go on about...