One of the original purposes of this site was to provide aspiring authors a forum where they could get help with their writing. I started out by editing and providing feedback to authors, as best as I could, before posting their works to the site. But there was always more to do than I had time to accomplish.
Now, over seven years since I first started the site, I would like to continue on the original path, perhaps with a slight detour here and there.
This section of the site is an open forum for people to post articles about writing, be it anthropomorphic fiction, short stories, full blown novels or poetry. I've got several articles in mind that I will be working on over the next few weeks and I encourage anyone else with suggestions about writing to add their own articles to this work.
Steve
Okay, this one is a big pet peeve of mine.
It's lose people, not loose!
Lose means to not win, to misplace or not be able to find.
Loose means not tight, not bound together, lacking moral restraint, etc.
Whenever I see someone write, "He had nothing to loose," or one of many variations, I want to scream at the author, "Unless he has dogs to sic on his target he doesn't have anything to loose, he has nothing to lose!"
This is really just a reminder that lose and loose are not the same word and don't have the same meaning. If you are careful to use them in the proper way then you will be sure not to lose any readers.
The use of effect and affect is something that tends to trip up new writers. I tend to have to refer to my writing hints when I want to use one of these words to make sure that I'm using the right one.
Affect is actually two words with the same spelling. The first of those words means "to pretend" or "to assume." For example, "He affected a show of sympathy as he consoled her." This is not the version we're concerned with here but is a good thing to know.
The second affect can be used as either a noun or a verb. As a noun this word means "emotion."
“The soldiers seen on television had been carefully chosen for blandness of affect.” (Norman Mailer)
As a verb, the much more common use, it means "to influence" or "to change."
The article he had just finished reading had a strong affect on his views.
Like affect, effect can also be used as a noun or a verb. The noun usage means "a result." When you affect something then you are probably going to see some sort of effect. Confused yet?
He tried and tried to get the engine to start, but to no effect.
Laying in the sun all day had the effect of burning her skin.
When used as a verb effect must be used with an object and has a meaning of "to produce an effect," or in other words "to bring about, "accomplish" or "make happen."
Changing the car's oil effected the miles per gallon.
Hopefully this article has had a beneficial affect, but in the end it's practice using these words that will effect whether or not you use them correctly.
References:
www.dictionary.com - Definitions of Affect and Effect.
Yes, I messed up the title to make a point.
In this day and age of word processors, anybody who is writing should be taking full advantage of the spell check features of whatever it is they are using. I realize that there might be some people who are using a generic text editor with which to craft their masterpiece, but if you are that's still no excuse not to check the spelling of your story.
There are a number of free spell checkers out there on the web to use if you don't have a word processing program that has one. Here are just a few:
www.spellcheck.net - a free online spell checker that will check up to 5,000 words.
www.iespell.com - a free Internet Explorer plug-in that provides spell checking inside of IE.
www.dynawares.com/spell.htm - a free spell checker application for Windows
If you want to find out about other free spell checkers then just go to Google, or your favorite search engine, and enter any combination of spell checker free and, if you want, your operating system. There should be at least one that will work for you.
I have been asked by I don't include a spell checker as part of the site's functionality. First and foremost adding that sort of feature, if it doesn't already exist, is quite a task. Second, given the plethora of free spell checkers out there I don't see a need to include on on the site. Third, and last, I don't expect people to be writing their stories directly into submission pages of the site. They should be writing them off-line, where they can review, re-read and re-write them until the story is ready for others to see. If I were to add a spell checker to the site then it would just encourage what to me is the wrong behavior.
So, in the end all I have to say is to improve how your writing is perceived, check your spelling before posting.