I think I may have posted this link here before, but it's well worth looking at again anyway. Although this is a site for SF writers, practically all the points here apply to anyone.

http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html

Terry

<Added>

I should have said a bit more: basically, this is a lexicon of writer's errors that mostly arose from workshop work - various different forms of exposition dumping, show not tell, the wonderful 'burly detective' syndrome and lots more. A lot of it is very funny, but I'm not suggesting for a minute that any of this applies to anyone on this site.

Terry,

Most interesting site. I cannot help feeling that if a very embracive and creative writer deliberately attempted to include most of these 'donts' into a single story, we would see the birth of a Masterpiece!

Len

It's helpful list of common faults that becomes so overwhelming the farther down the page one reads that I can imagine it deterring an author from making a start. It would be interesting to take a book at random and edit it accordingly. Would there be anything left? I was interested to read the section on repetition, as these always hit me in the eye, often-used words or not. A good guide but not to be taken as gospel IMO. There will always be people who can break the rules and get away with it.

Nell.

This was great Terry. I loved the 'squid in the mouth' and 'squid on the mantlepiece' sections. I hope Iw asn't liking them so much because I could identify this in my own writing...er...

JB

The value for me in this kind of guide is the hyperchondriac factor - I swear I've got all these symptoms in my writing. I'm writing a sci-fi/fantasy at the moment, so find this kind of thing very useful in pointing out all the tempting short cuts available in this genre. But Nell's right too about not taking too much of it on board. I actually stopped the novel at one point and wrote about 90 pages of background, because I kept asking questions of how things worked on my made-up world, and each question led to another. I also bought a couple of heavyweight books on world-building, but hardly understood a word since I dropped out of science in the fourth form and these were very thorough, not to mention scathing of 'bad science' (mind you, bad science never stopped Dr Who).

I've been listening to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine on OneWord radio, and was impressed by the way the time-traveller explained how his machine worked to his colleagues. It actually seemed plausible, yet could so easily have failed without the skill of the writer. I must read The Hitchikers' Guide to the Galaxy again - all of it, outrageous as it is - is just so believable.

nell.