Most writers spend hours making sure a sentence says the right thing. Fewer spend time listening to how it sounds. Yet prose is never silent. Even on the page, rhythm shapes meaning. Readers “hear” your sentences in their inner ear, and that music influences how quickly they read, what emotions they feel, and whether they linger or skim.

Most of us learned punctuation through red ink: commas spliced, semicolons corrected, dashes outlawed unless we could prove their worth. The result? Writers often treat punctuation like a legal code: follow it, or risk punishment.

Writers rarely set out to be wordy. The problem sneaks in through first drafts. We add scaffolding to get the thought down, stack adjectives to feel more descriptive, hedge with phrases like “it might be possible” so we don’t sound too blunt. The impulse is understandable — language feels safer padded.

Dialogue is one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s kit.

Done well, it draws the reader in, reveals character, and carries story forward without wasting a word. Done poorly, it clangs on the page. It’s either wooden or it tries too hard to mimic real speech.

Every fiction writer has an inner “grammar teacher” lurking over their shoulder – that stern voice reciting all the rules you learned in school.