Why would you want to use Early Modern (think Shakespearean) English? Wasn’t high school English Lit hard enough? There are valid reasons to use Early Modern English in your book. I recently worked with an author writing a historical fiction book with Mennonite and Amish characters. Any dialogue with these characters was in early modern English because it helped differentiate… Read More »Character Dialogue: How to use Thou, Thee, Thy, and Thine

We learned where to put periods, commas, and paratheses in grade school (and even got tested on it as teenagers). But, once I became an editor, I realized that the rules were not as cut and dry as I thought. Periods Ok, these are the easiest. Periods are designed to denote the end of a sentence. However, you often don’t… Read More »Periods, Commas, and Parentheses: Where to Put Each One

With the release of new writing and editing algorithms, it seems like most writers can make do without working with a human editor. Why pay someone to edit your book when you can use Grammarly? The truth is, these AI algorithms are helpful but imperfect. As a book editor, I do use Grammarly. It helps me catch certain mistakes that… Read More »Can Grammarly Replace a Human Editor for Full Length Books?