A Guide to Ink Masterpieces

Six Vital Rules to Storytelling

Over the past week, I have spent hours and hours of my time providing very thorough and focused critiques to members of this community. Some are new to the community, others requested for me to personally provide my feedback, and then some of them are just friends who I have grown to care about and want to see their work reach its full potential as I know it can. However, through spending probably twenty hours total on five or six reviews, I discovered a lot of common errors amongst both new and experienced writers. And let's face it, I am a Hell-Hound when it comes to grammar.

So for this article, I am going to quite literally copy and paste all the tips and grammar rules I have told others time and time again. These tips are simple and are at a quite casual level for writers. They aren't complex and difficult to remember; however I suggest you bookmark this article for reference until you have implemented these things enough times that it is a permanent part of you.


Tip #1
The only time a comma can be used to combine two complete sentences is if you use conjunctions such as but, and, however, or although; you get the idea. Those conjunctions should come after the comma and before the second complete sentence.

Now you can always keep the comma with a coordinating conjunction, and turn the second portion of the sentence into a complete sentence. There are many ways to write this sentence so that it is grammatically correct; however, I only provided one example.


Tip #2
As a rule of thumb- which I use all the time- punctuation is the best way to tell you when to pause, take a breath, or start fresh on something. A comma would be a pause, a period would allow you to take a breath and make it sound final. This is where your instincts as a writer kicks in and guides you the best it can.


Tip #3
When you are talking about multiple objects, subjects, thoughts or anything of the such, you would use commas as I have just done in this sentence. The only time you would not use a comma is when you are at the end of listing your "multiple objects, subjects, thoughts or anything of the such."

What you see printed in bold in the previous bullet is a conjunction. A conjunction is an uninflected linguistic form that joins together sentences, clauses, phrases, or words. Actually, the more appropriate term is coordinating conjunctions. And, but, or, nor, for, yet and so are all coordinating conjunctions.

Coordinating conjunctions, however, are only one of the many types of conjunctions and other linking words. I am going to provide a link to page that will give you a long list of words that are coordinators, subordinators, sentence connectors and prepositions. Please be sure to check the link out, and you definitely need to bookmark that page so that you can use it as a reference tool in the future. Grammar: Conjunctions and Linking Words


Tip #4
As it is defined by Merriam Webster , a semicolon is a punctuation mark ; used chiefly in a coordinating function between major sentence elements (as independent clauses of a compound sentence).

Essentially, a semicolon has the same purpose of the period. The only difference between the two is that a semicolon can only be used to connect sentences that related to each other or involve the same subject. As we all know that paragraphs are generally three to five sentences long, and all the sentences must be about the same topic or involve the same subject. Therefore, you are actually able to use a semicolon through out an entire paragraph if you chose to. (Although I would not recommend going crazy with semicolons. I personally use them because they are just a nice change from periods.)

Tip #5
K.I.S.S. - Keep it simple, stupid! This will help you a lot when you find yourself saturating your work in useless and unnecessary words and phrases. Unfortunately for you, I notice that in most your sentences you say the same thing twice only in different words. Cut that crap out. Say it once, and do it efficiently.


Tip #6
There are three tenses that you have the choice of writing in: past tense, present tense or future tense. You can only write in one tense. I know it can be difficult to remember your choice of tense, but the best solution to this is by following some simple instructions.

You should always write in a tense that you are the most comfortable writing in. Most writers find past tense to be their choice, and future tense is the least popular of the three because it is so difficult to talk about what is going to happen rather than what has already happened or is happening.

Once you have chosen what tense you are going to write in, stick with it. Get a post it, and write which tense you will be writing in for this post, short story, or whatever type of literary work you are working on at the time. Stick it close to your computer screen where you will always see it. It will help you stay conscious of it.

After you have completed your work, give yourself some time to get some space from your work. Do not post it right away for public viewing. Come back to it and read it over again. Go through it and edit it where it needs to be edited. Ensure that you have not strayed from your chosen tense.


As you can see, most of these rules revolve around proper punctuation. However, the second most common error writers have are their inability to keep their tense straight. I will go into further detail on tenses and point of views in the next post. But for this one... Consider this as me venting.