Midwest Princess

4. common mistakes

iv.

how long has it been since i've updated this ..... i am so sorry. this is collecting dust.

i'll get back to requests in a minute but here are some mistakes i see made on wattpad A LOT that are actually super easy to fix and the small adjustments can improve your writing so much. i've been there too, dw.

       1. dashes and hyphens

there are two dashes: – (the en dash), and — (the em dash) and both are misused frequently on here. the hyphen (-) tends to be thought of as the smallest dash, but it's a seperate thing.

the hyphen is used to join hyphenated (aka connected) words together, indicate word breaks, link prefixes and connect numbers/fractions, and sometimes more. some examples of hyphenated words are ex-husband, twenty-two, anxiety-ridden, u-turn, good-looking, etc. using a dash to conjoin words wouldn't make sense, because dashes are separators, and hyphens are connectors.

the en dash, the smaller of the two dashes, is used for the range between time periods, to indicate distance, scores, and number spans. examples of the en dash are 1–10, 2000–2021, "the team won with a score of 5–0," a flight from canada–brazil, etc.

the em dash, notably larger than the hyphen and en dash, is used to break a sentence, interrupt dialogue or a train of thought, create emphasis or indicate sudden change. you can typically substitute colons and parentheses with an em dash, but i recommend using them sparingly. examples are "she called him on sunday—before the party but after the picnic—and he didn't pick up," in dialogue: "no, i didn't—i was busy with homework," "it was fun, but—no way! did you see that?" etc.

again, using hyphens as dashes and vice-versa is an easy mistake—believe me, i used to do it all the time—but there's big grammatical differences between them all and learning which is which can help your writing a lot.

2. consistent tenses

i see this a lot and to be brutally honest, it's probably the thing that will pull me away from a book before even finishing the prologue. if you're writing in present tense, you've gotta stick to it! same goes for past tense or anything else. i've seen plenty of books where the synopsis or prologue wanders between tenses without even realizing and it's pretty distracting.

i'll mess up part of an old prologue as an example. here it is with awkward, meandering tenses:

"When she's eleven and flees the desert, her slight body has barely grown into her bones. Her limbs were long, spindly, spiderlike, and she still struggles to use them. Today, she'll die if she doesn't. Soldiers from the Silver Alps pillage and expanded, spilling into new continents little by little. Her village is the latest conquered."

i've bolded the differences, so note the original:

"When she's eleven and flees the desert, her slight body has barely grown into her bones. Her limbs are long, spindly, spiderlike, and she still struggles to use them. Today, she'll die if she doesn't. Soldiers from the Silver Alps pillage and expand, spilling into new continents little by little. Her village is the latest conquered."

the most obvious instance is "her limbs were long, and she still struggles to use them." her limbs haven't changed length halfway through the sentence. were and struggles are conflictive here. they're written from different times, and are grammatically incorrect. if you wanted to write entirely in past tense, you could change 'struggles' to 'struggled' in the first excerpt and it would work just as well as the second. but i wrote the prologue in present tense, so 'were' was written as 'are' in the original. both are correct, but you have to be sure you're sticking to one or the other, rather than something in-between.