Monthly Archives March 2020

Here’s a Table of Contents of all of the Critique Technique posts to make it easier to go directly to the post you want to read.

Introductory Posts

Part 1: Critique, Technique, and Procedure

Part 1A: The Critiquer’s Mind

Part 1B: Life on the Other Side of the Critique

Part 2: Series Overview

Reader Response

Part 3: How Do You Feel?

Part 3.5: Authorial Intentions and Tracking Your Own Responses

Beginnings and Endings

Part 5: Weak or Missing Hook

Part 6: The Wrong Beginning

Part 7: Scene and Chapter Endings

Part 8: Story Endings

Characterization

Part 9: Characters and Conflict

Part 10: Poor Characterization

Part 11: Lack of Character Development

Part 12: Showing and Telling in Character Development

Part 13: Timing the Reveal

Pa...

Capitalization is another one of those “mechanical” writing areas where I see a lot of problems. New writers aren’t the only ones who struggle with it either.

Most writers get the very most basic things right: capitalizing the first word of each sentence, the names of people and places, and so on. Word processors’ grammar checkers will often look for capitalization errors, too, if that functionality is turned on, and there are online tools like Grammarly and web sites where writers can check the rules. A few are the Catalyst capitalization page from McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Grammarly’s blog page on the topic, and “A Little Help with Capitals” from Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab.

Fiction Flubs

These resource...