Punctuation 101 is here at last! This is a book for fiction writers. This is a handy reference that you can keep close by so you don’t have to page through the massive Chicago Manual of Style, which I love, but that index alone is twenty-nine pages long! Trust me. I used it as a reference to check my facts as I wrote Punctuation 101, and I spent a lot of time trying to find things in that index…
Why write a book on punctuation? Well, it all started back in 2011 with an idea, then a series of blog posts on goteenwriters.com in 2012 and 2013. I saw so many of the same mistakes in the manuscripts of beginning writers, I wanted to lay out the rules in an straightforward and easy-to-understand way. The posts were a hit. And many of those teen bloggers said, “You should write this as a book, Jill!” And I thought, ooh. That would be a lot of work.
:-/
It was a lot of work! I would spend some time writing it, then I would get SO BORED of commas or semicolons or em dashes that I’d quit and work on something else. But every time this happened, I eventually went back. I’d poured too much time and effort into this project to just walk away. And while it was boring for me to write it and rewrite it again and again, I knew it would be a help to you all. Still, I needed to take some serious punctuation breaks throughout the year, because one can only take so much punctuation at a time, you know?
But I finished, and I am SO HAPPY! *dances* Punctuation 101 is here to stay. Grab your copy. Dog-ear the pages with rules you need to reference. (My trouble area is capitalization in titles. Who can remember all that? Seriously?) And then write your novel without worrying about the rules. Because we all just want to write stories, right? I know I do.
Punctuation 101: A Fiction Writer’s Guide to Getting it Right
Are you tired of paging through massive style guides or scouring the internet for information on em dashes, colons, or which words to capitalize in a title? Punctuation 101 will save you time and energy, which you can spend writing your novel.
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