It seems every time you go to a new class, they’ll want you to use a different format for your citations on your essays. While some fields pretty much use one format regularly—psychology, for example, nearly always uses APA format, while literature prefers MLA—that distinction isn’t always clear…
Transitional Expressions and How to Use Them
Transitional expressions can really improve your essay. They help serve as sort of guidelines or explanations, helping the reader follow your train of thought as you go from idea to idea. They make your essay flow better and make it more interesting to read.
Examples of Transitional E…
Fixing a Fragment with No Subject
The most common type of fragment is a sentence that is missing its subject. You want to make sure you clean up your fragments to make sure your essay gets as high of a grade as possible.
A fragment without a subject looks like this:
“Just wanted to go to the store before the rush.”
That’s a pe…
Formatting tips for a Business Letter
So, you have to write a business letter. This is something that you may end up facing, and if your experience in writing is limited to essays and articles, you may have a brief moment of panic. Whether you’re writing a letter to an admissions expert to get into grad school, or writing a cover l…
Boldly Defending the Adverb
It’s Adverbs Week here on Wordsmith Essays, and I want to talk a little bit about how they’ve gotten a bad rap when it comes to writing, be it in essays and articles or less formal fiction writing.
Some Writers Hate the Adverb
No less a writer than Stephen King has gone on record trashing the adv…
Note-Taking and Annotations Can Help Your Writing
One common mistake I see new writers making, when they are tabbed with writing an essay, is poor note-taking. I was guilty of this myself as a young writer. If I was tabbed to write an essay on, say, Romeo and Juliet, I would read the entire thing and then sit down and start writing. How bad c…
Conflict: An Intersection of Purpose
All stories need conflict. I don’t think that this concept is really surprising to anyone, in fact it’s a bit of a cliche at this point, but it still needs to be said because a lot of writers have very weird ideas about what conflict means in terms of storytelling. Generally speaking, conflict is…
Character Motivation: The Engine that Drives a Story
Character motivation is the engine that drives a story. At the most basic level, an audience wants to understand the “why” behind why a character acts the way that they do. It is the basic way that a reader will engage with the story, but despite how important character motivation is, an emb…
How to Fix Awkward Writing
The major difficulty in giving advice about writing is that there is a gulf of difference between theory and practice. It is extraordinarily easy to tell someone that their story needs a stronger climax or that their work sounds awkward and stilted, but explaining how to fix these things in a…
Unconventional Tools for Writers
It would be natural to assume that writers don’t need much in the way of tools or equipment. After all, the only things you really need in order to write is something to write with and something to write on. And compared to other occupations, where people might be required to work with several p…
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