Time for me to share my secrets. More likely, I'm handing you the tools you need to research all this yourself, call me out on my mistakes, and make me look like an idiot.
Karen Elizabeth Gordon is my grammar muse, and I can't recommend her books strongly enough. They're not dry like a lot of technical writing manuals - I read The Deluxe Transitive Vampire four times before I realized it was a textbook. She's got a highbrow tone that's hard to follow sometimes, only because she's mastered the English language while we cretins are still scratching our pits and picking bugs out of each others' hair.
📖 The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
and it's companion piece,
📖 The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
Screw Grammarly because most people use it as an alternative to actually learning, resulting in the story equivalent of photoshop dropshadow filters making laypeople believe they're digital artists. But they do have a nice, free, online library that explains how words work.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/category/handbook/
Lexico is more a dictionary of grammar terms than a guide, but it offers clarity that I've found useful. Also it's from Oxford, home of the Oxford comma, so I'm automatically a fan.
https://www.lexico.com/grammar/grammar-a-z
More resources to come.
YOU ARE READING
How To Write Good: A Lightly Salted Guide to Stepping Up Your Wattpad Game.
Non-FictionPeople will tell you writing is hard. That's a load of crap. Anyone with a pencil can scrawl a line of graphite across a page and call themselves a writer. Does that mean anyone can be an author? No. Only people who are willing to sacrifice their ti...
