Ever get a feeling that something’s wrong with your writing, but you can’t quite put your finger on it and neither can your critique partner? Ever get a rejection that says something like: “This story didn’t grab me the way I thought it would?” My critique partner told me recently: “Hey, you really made big difference in that opening scene. Wow! It really sings now. The scene is so alive. You must have made a lot of changes.” Me: “No, I only changed a few words and re-wrote a couple of sentences.”

It’s true. My partner was blown away by a few simple changes. Most of them were either word choice changes or grammatical changes. How did I do it? For a long time, I didn’t really know. Maybe I’m just instinctively good at grammar (don’t hate me). But that wasn’t good enough for me. I had to try to understand what makes writing bad versus good and good versus great. Luckily, I’m a tutor by trade so I have lots of opportunities to read what people write and try to help them understand what they want to say and how to say it better. I haven’t gotten all the answers (yet!) but for the last few years I’ve been pulling my ideas together into grammar workshops. Now, I’ve taken all my grammar lessons and put them together in an ebook, Telling Grammar. This grammar book contains practical, useful solutions that you can start using in your writing the moment you learn about them. No short lists of “do this, but never do that”, no drawn out lectures about subjects, predicates and complex clauses. And I promise you won’t ever make you diagram sentences!

What you’ll get instead is a sensible explanation of what works grammatically and why it works. Not the kind of scholarly details you’d find in a textbook (although I do provide the correct grammar terms for the die-hards out there). You’ll get real, practical applications and examples geared mostly to romance writing because that’s what I’m most familiar with. For those of you who are really old-school, there are practice exercises that you can try on your own (answers provided).

This ebook is for writers who don’t “get” grammar and for those who think they don’t want to get it. Proper use of grammar makes a story flow smoothly, page after page. Poorly constructed sentences and paragraphs ruin the pace of your novel and make editors and agents pass up your manuscript. This book makes it easy for you to try out techniques that work and it explains why they work so you don’t go back to making the same old mistakes. In this book are techniques that show you how to blend different grammar constructions to make action, emotion, and tension come through.

At only $2.99 it’s a good investment in your writing skills. Telling Grammar is available at:

Smashwords

Amazon 

I’d love to give away two copies of this ebook today. Just comment to be entered into the random drawing. Looking forward to sharing grammar ideas with you!

About Kat Duncan!

Kat Duncan is a creation extremist who is doing her best to identify human creativity and free it from captivity, one student at a time. As a young child, Kat once tried to confess the telling of her stories to her parish priest because she thought they fit the definition the nuns gave for telling a lie. With her lies fully sanctioned and blessed by church authorities, Kat writes stories to entertain and enlighten. She is a Fulbright Scholar who spent a year in West Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kat has a master’s degree in education and over a dozen years of experience teaching students from elementary through college and beyond. Her stories span a range from realistic historicals to quirky suspense. Visit her at: http://www.katduncan.net

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