Writing isn’t always putting thousands of words together
which seems to deter some from the field. There are many opportunities to hone
your craft in a sentence or two, or just a few words.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but good captions
don’t need more than a few. If possible your caption should be in the same
style as any article that accompanies it – you can also study the usual style
of the publication for a clue. Punctuate most captions like you would for a
sentence, capitalize the first letters of the caption and proper names. If the
subject in a photo has been thoroughly identified in the text of the article,
you do not need to use more than a simple title, at most, and the person’s
name. If there is more than one subject, provide some direction. Avoid
unnecessary purple prose and speak in full sentences. Lastly, make sure to
include proper attribution for each photo used.
Titles shouldn’t be more than a few words, if that many. Your
title should catch someone’s attention but it should not be misleading, it
needs to fit your article, story or novel. Choose a few descriptive words for
your story and see if you can pull a title from those terms. For a short story
or novel, you might choose a significant turning point, important phrase,
reference to a location (if the location is important to the story) or even a
character’s name as part of the title. Capitalization of titles may vary
depending on the individual publication, but short of specific guidelines,
there are two common rules: Capitalize only the first word of the title, or capitalize
all proper nouns in the title.
You should always have short taglines, 25 and 50 word blurbs
ready for your book. Although it might sound daunting to compress all the pages
in your story down to a few sentences, think of the most important themes, the
major conflict, a significant result, or historical significance to your story.
Sometimes a blurb is called an elevator pitch – imagine that you have just the
few minutes of an elevator ride to present (sell) your story to a publisher.
Get the main thought out in as few words as possible. Romeo and Juliet, for
example, could be sold with the words “A tragic and forbidden love set against
the hatred of feuding families.” (12 words) Prepare these blurbs so that
you can use them while you query publishers, help design your book jacket, and
market your book with social media.
Writing abstracts can be a lucrative job and involves writing
“summaries” of no more than 100 to 250 words. Thoroughly read the article that
you need to write the abstract from, pick out key terminology. Ask basic questions
for your notes like: What is the subject or study about? How was the study
done? When and where did this happen? What is the overall conclusion? Use the
answers to these questions to begin your abstract. Don’t re-use the title of
the article as that will normally appear with the abstract anyway. Never add
any information into the abstract that doesn’t appear in the original article.
Writing Exercise: Choose a
character from your book (or one from a recent book you’ve read). In your
character’s words, describe a person (one who does NOT appear in the story)
that had a significant impact on that character’s life.
Writing Prompt: Pick up a
daily newspaper, read each of the articles on the front page. Choose two or
three words from each article that you feel are most significant; make a new
heading for each of the articles using those words.
