This guest column is from BookBaby, a writer's site with regular columns to help writers get published and write gooder - er, I mean, write better. The column I've referenced mentions some writing no-nos that I rarely see on this site, but they might be helpful to those writing their first story, whether vignette or novel. And I need to review them regularly to make sure I'm technically correct (the judgement on the quality of the story is the prerogative of the readers). Hope y'all get a kick out of them.

Thanks for the link, Terry. What a great informative site!

Haha! That was pretty funny.

Haha that was great! I think my favorite was the dry as a shirt label writing.

That was interesting. Long ago I had read or tried to read stories by someone where I think English wasn't his first language. He had no contractions at all in his stories that it literally drove me up the wall. I just never could read past the first several paragraphs.

I am currently reading a book that does many of these! The author can't pick a POV; the dialog is so dry I keep skimming over it; the only current source of tension is some embarrassment one of the characters is feeling; there are too many characters to keep track of (at least 16 without counting all the children running around (and I think there are 8 of those at this point, not including newborn babies that have joined the story (2, possibly 3, the moms all have L names (another thing in the list) and I've forgotten which of them had babies)); Other than in the first chapter when someone was threatened at knife point, only mundane things keep happening. The second it seems like something interesting might happen, the scene ends and we skip ahead in time past it. And, one I'm not sure was in the list but could have been, everyone keeps unrealistically saying exactly what they mean and being understood. I am absolutely certain I know how it will end, but I keep reading it anyway... almost like its some sort of challenge I can't give up on.

I saw a gag in the July/August issue of "Reader's Digest" that seems germane: People found guilty of not using punctuation deserve the longest sentence possible.

- Lynn