Writers are often told to stick to the active voice. But how do active and passive constructions differ? In this article, we look at the impact of grammatical voice on sentence length, clarity, and tension.

Writers often labor away to get a description exactly as they want it—only to have it returned with, “Don’t tell me, show me,” scrawled in the margin by an editor or writing mentor. In this article, we take a closer look at showing and telling.

Literary students are lectured to ad infinitum on the strengths of active verbs. Yet what makes an active verb not just okay, but great? In this article, we analyze the impact of verb choice on scene construction and characterization.