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Archives for February 2019

Best Practices for a Plagiaristic Publishing World

February 28, 2019 by Nic Nelson Leave a Comment

Cristiane Serruya, lookin' good... but not writing well

Cristiane Serruya has turned out to be an archetypal 21st-Century plagiarist. She exemplifies genre-fiction plagiarism at its “best”: minimum cost and effort, maximum profit and social success. She had high standards for whose work she plagiarized—only rip off the best—and she “serruyaed” together scenes and passages from more than seventy different sources for each of […]

Filed Under: Blog, Publish Wisely, Writing

Plagiarism’s #MeToo Moment Has Arrived

February 25, 2019 by Nic Nelson Leave a Comment

With Nora Roberts’ revelation of Cristiane Serruya’s rampant plagiarism igniting a Twitter firestorm in the romance-genre publishing community, the #MeToo moment for plagiarized authors may have arrived. This time the Bad Guy of the story isn’t men taking sexual advantage of vulnerable women, it’s self-published plagiarist authors taking advantage of vulnerable established authors. How can […]

Filed Under: Blog, Editing, Writing

Building Solid Paragraphs

February 22, 2019 by Nic Nelson 2 Comments

I see it all the time. A perfectly good scene, shoehorned into just three or four monolithic paragraphs. Or a whole dialogue poured into a single huge paragraph, flat and solid as a concrete sidewalk. Sometimes a writer will err in the opposite direction, smashing a coherent paragraph into smaller shards just to add more […]

Filed Under: Editing, Writing Tagged With: academic writing, editing, paragraphs

Welcome, Ethan Ransom, Screenwriter and Script Doctor!

February 3, 2019 by Nic Nelson 2 Comments

Wordsmith Writing Coaches is proud to welcome our newest Wordsmith, Ethan Ransom! Ethan grew up in the rolling hills of Virginia where he developed a fascination with examining the grittier side of life, exploring conflicted and complex characters, grounded plots, and natural, authentic dialogue. He focuses on stories of hard-won redemption found in a journey […]

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: screenwriting

Goodbye, Google+

February 2, 2019 by Nic Nelson Leave a Comment

When Google announced its launch of Google+, I was already blogging on another platform and couldn’t imagine being able to add yet another social media or blogging outlet. But since it promised to smoothly integrate with my Google account, and I was also using Google Voice and Google Docs, and didn’t cost anything, I went […]

Filed Under: Blog