Formula fiction works best when it works fast, snagging the audience’s attention immediately and pulling us through the story with irresistible momentum. The post Plotting Fiction: The Pulp Master Plot, Part 2 first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more

Your author bio is the third-person “about the author” blurb on or inside a book that authors provide in submissions to publishers and agents. It’s short, about a hundred words, so you’ve got to make all the words count. The post Guide to Writing an Eye-Catching Author Bio first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more

Many popular fiction genres are written to rigid specifications. By publisher mandate, every romance novel must have a happy ending, and many imprints specify X number of sex scenes and Y number of misunderstandings between the main couple; house style may even dictate where in the word count those scenes must fall. The post Plotting Fiction: The Pulp Master Plot, Part 1 first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more

You are not doomed to be a third-grade-quality writer. You need to unleash your writing power, rip off your self-editing chains, and run blindly ahead into the mysterious practice of freewriting exercises! The post Become a Better Writer through Freewriting first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more

Credulous tech dweebs, though, insist on imbuing LLMs with almost supernatural qualities that they manifestly do not possess. This superstitious regard for chatbots as all-knowing oracles is both hilarious and a little pitiful. Less blatantly, but just as insidiously, industry hucksters are still trying to sell LLMs as a solution for creative writing, such as as a way to jumpstart a fiction project or analyze the quality of your prose. These are the tasks for which chatbots are spectacularly unsuited. The post What It Means to Think Like a Human first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more

Let's talk about using computers for co-editing and co-working tools to enhance productivity. The post Collaborative Editing in a Digital World first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more

For this first post in the series, we’ll start with the most important aspect of good fictional magic I can think of: establishing its limitations. The post How to Write Believable Magic: Limitations first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more

Having already erroneously sold GPT as a substitute for doing research, developing a thesis, picking your words, and putting them in order, tech entrepreneurs are horning in on the one part of the process that still ostensibly requires a human touch: criticism. The post Make Your Writing Soar with Data Analysis first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more

The growth of the internet from a few scientists’ pet project to everyone’s necessary tool was incredibly fast, and now digital technology has become a mandatory component of learning, researching, and thinking. The post Effects of the Digital Age on Learning, Libraries, and Thinking first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more

Nine months into this AI revolution, the rhetoric has cooled off. Certainly, people continue to use ChatGPT for all kinds of purposes. But human writers and editors are still going strong and still showing their value; indeed, at the time of this writing an ongoing strike by the Writers’ Guild is making Hollywood film and TV producers very nervous. The post AI: Beyond the Jubilant Buildup first appeared on The Proofreading Pulse ..read more