Creative Writing Tips and Tricks!

Starting with a Strong Beginning! All good works of fiction strive to capture a reader’s imagination and transport them to a new world. To effectively hook your reader, you’re going to need a strong opening! Some things you’ll need to consider are: Introducing your character(s) - you’ll want to show the reader right away who...

Writing to Stop the World from Ending

In the wake of a global pandemic that has halted the world, all of my emotions are heightened. Feelings of fear, anger, sadness, and concern have occupied every single second of existence as I move through life at a languid pace. Though I have been infinitely blessed with my health, there are few things as...

How to Play the Game Even When the Rules Change

When it comes to writing in an academic sense, especially when it comes to writing for a grade, it can get confusing because each professor grades completely differently. I am an English major which means I do a lot of writing in my schooling. I have seen all sorts of different grading and rubric styles...

Autocorrect vs Free Will

Autocorrect: I don’t think I’d remember how to spell “February” without it, but every time that it corrects my more anger-driven messages to “ducking hell,” I want to light autocorrect on fire. I have a love-hate relationship with spell- and grammar-check as well. These systems aren’t always right, and as helpful as they can be,...

Looking Past Line Edits

Peer review day. If it’s anything like my experiences, nerves are on edge, tensions are high, partners are found, and suddenly all eyes are on the writing. Crunch time. Sometimes professors will ask each person to look at just one peer’s work; sometimes they must find multiple partners to swap with. Reviewing others’ work has...

How to Effectively Proofread Your Essay

Editing and proofreading our own essays can be the most annoying process after writing a paper. This burden can often lead us to bypass that process and leave our writing with a bunch of mistakes. However, there are several useful tips you can use to ease the editing process.     Give yourself enough time...

The Rollercoaster of Writing

Over the course of my writing career I’ve noticed a trend. Writing is hard because it’s as frightening as a rollercoaster. There are even models, on the internet, for how to plot a story with a rollercoaster-like method. However, I like to view the process of writing as a rollercoaster, not just a story-plot rollercoaster...

For When You Get Stuck Midway Through a Paper

We have all experienced the dreaded reality where the latter half of our papers start creeping into terrible territory. And we certainly all know that feeling of getting halfway through a paper, then getting hit with the devastating realization that we’re quickly running out of things to write about. Perhaps you had less to say...

Tidying Up: Tips for Condensing an Essay

Have you ever gone way past the word limit on an essay and then felt unsure about what to remove? I certainly have. Whether it’s because a prompt captured my interest or because I did not know how to capture my thoughts on paper in a way that I liked, writing over the word limit...

What’s the Rush?

We’ve all heard that we shouldn’t procrastinate. That we should start writing as soon as possible to develop our ideas and allow for any potential changes. And sometimes we do start writing early. But more often than not we bide our time and wait until the last minute to do the bulk of the work....