1) First person omniscient narrators
With the singular exception of stories entirely built around it—e.g. doomed prophets, gods pretending to be mortals—this is always wrong. Hearing a narrator say “What I didn’t see was the malicious glint in her eyes.” is just plain wrong. Sure, with past tense you might be able to justify this as hindsight narration, but it usually isn’t, and it definitely isn’t with present tense (unless it’s sarcasm, but I digress).

2) Lacking distinct character voices with multiple PoV characters (or an abstract narrator)
When a story has multiple viewpoint characters, they need to have strongly distinct voices otherwise the readers (and the author, too) will be confused by what’s going on. You can’t just expect readers to always page back / scroll back to when the viewpoint character was announced.
Technically, this is also an issue when you have only a single viewpoint character, but it’s easy to ignore there.
However, it is not okay with a single viewpoint character, if that character is an abstract narrator—i.e. one not part of the universe—because *it* has no reason to care about anything in the story. This is basically a special case of Distant Language.
Many writers (particularly in the past) seem to think that using an abstract narrator means they don’t need to filter the descriptions of what is happening through a character’s eyes constantly, but all they’ve done is add another character to the roster—one that doesn’t give a fuck about the story being told.

3) This one’s more of a pet peeve of mine, but I *hate* the entire genre of comedy that is based on the characters being less competent at communication than an autistic child.
Since I was a little child, I’ve always found these painfully cringe. Absolute torture. I have no idea how anyone can enjoy that kind of crap :Ü™

This article helped shed light on why I am so irked by the use of this style. I am currently reading Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub. It’s an engaging story, but I often find myself immediately forgetting what I just read. It’s like a whirlwind of heavy description in my head, all buzzing past, but very little of it actually sticks. It’s overwhelming to my senses.

“I find the use of “Which” as a relative pronoun to start a sentence jarring” … everyone has personal preferences, but I assure you this one is rare, and wouldn’t preclude a novel from becoming a best seller. How many of Harry Potter’s readers do you think even know ‘which’ starting a sentence is uncouth? The best selling novels are NOT the best writing. You may be an amazing teacher of ‘how to write grammatically correct English’, but that’s not what the best selling novels contain. I would also bet a lot that you’re focusing much too of your students’ time on the wrong aspects of writing stories.

In addition, it is a waste of a perfectly good language that happens to have a past tense.

I speak four languages with varying degrees of fluency: English, German, French, and Italian. Each of these languages contains a past tense. The first way a person learns to speak in these languages is in the the present tense, but as mastery is achieved, past tense and then future will be taught. Why is this? Because, quite simply, tenses make for clearer writing.

There are languages that do not even contain this wonderful thing, the ability to say when something happened. I can’t fathom why this wonderful aspect of language would not be embraced and used for the clarity it creates.

I’m glad you’re finding the reviews helpful. Enjoy your stay, and good luck with your own writing projects.

Punctuation rules are a weird blend of personal writing style and formal edicts, where no choice is ever 100% right or 100% wrong. The best advice I can offer is to find an author you like, study how they use punctuation, and then try to emulate them in your own writing. As a general rule, the current trend appears to be “less is more.” Use whatever punctuation is required to make the meaning of your sentences clear and easy to parse, but resist the temptation to force a particular rhythm on your readers. And then, whatever system you pick, be consistent with it.

A comment from me the new writer: I find it difficult to follow the ever changing comma rules, hyphen, dash, and semi colon etc rules. Is it such a big deal to use commas too much or too little? I used them where I would want them when I read to make the sentence real and readable.

Thanks again, it has been about three hours and I am still engrossed with how you teach and explain how to write better.

Ellen

I love to write, I am am getting older by the day and want to get published soon. It is difficult to learn how to do everything that is needed when all I want to do is write and have someone else do the hard stuff!

Thank you for your fun knowledge, I look forward to more learning on my path to being a new romance novel author….and children’s books and erotic. One must have variety!

Ellen