Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Free Book for JUNE! and a writing tip

Free for JUNE!
Just go to our home page www.writewordsinc.com and 
click on the cover. Download as usual, 
You will not be CHARGED.   

by C.M. Albrecht

An escaped convict finds refuge as a hired hand on a small farm. But the farm belongs to a deputy sheriff.

In this dark tale everybody has an agenda, the fugitive, the sheriff, the sheriff’s wife and everybody else in the small town of Ashley.

Things in Ashley have to come to a head...and they do. In a terrible way!

Question from the e-mail: What are the most common mistakes you see in the manuscripts you receive. I don't expect you to answer all at once, but if you could put one up on your blog every few days, I will compile my own file of "What NOT to dos!" I'm getting it, Keep Sending Them!!

Answer:  Problems with capitalization are in almost every manuscript.

The most common ones are Mom and Dad.  Mom or Dad gets a cap when used as a noun, but not if it’s a pronoun.  “Yesterday, Mom told me my dad would be out of town.” The my before dad makes it a pronoun.

Same rule with military titles. The captain, gets no cap. O captain, my captain, still no cap, but if a name is attached, as in Captain Horatio Hornblower, then it gets a cap.

"Attention," the captain said.  (NO cap.) Or the lieutenant, sergent, major general,etc., said. (all no caps.)

"Attention," Captain Hornblower said. (gets one! Same for any rank, when the formal name is used.)

When we are busy writing/creating most of us forget this rule.  For that reason, once a story is finished, if there's a captain in it, or a sergent, major, and so on, it's a good idea to search for the term and look at whether it should be a cap or not.

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