The beginning writer generally has a great idea he or she wants to get down on paper; this is the first requirement of creative writing - to tell the story. It isn't until the editing process that the many faults within the prose become apparent.

Our creative writing side naturally thirsts for plotting, describing scene and giving birth to the many characters that populate our novel, so it isn't at all unusual for the quality of our prose to take a beating, particularly when we are new to the game of writing.

This course teaches how to identify the areas that often cause problems, which is to say, give the reader problems in following the story fluidly and enjoyably.

At the end of the course you will have access to a set of practical tools that can be applied to your prose quickly, thereby improving it to a more professional level.

New writers think that adverbs and adjectives should be used copiously, in a variety of forms and for every situation. The fact is that overuse of these words can actually kill your writing, giving it a very amateurish feel.

In this lecture you will learn how to identify this tendency in your prose, and how to correct it.

You might think this is minor subject without real importance to your fiction, but far from. the correct use of each gives your prose a dynamic flavor, giving it a punchy feel that absorbs the reader.

In this lecture you will learn how to tell the difference between each style of expression and choose the right voice for the situation.

Most people know and understand how to use the full stop (or period), the comma and other common punctuation marks, such as the question mark, but some are not so sure of others that are equally useful.

In this lecture you will learn how to use the colon, semi-colon, ellipsis, hyphen, en-dash and em-dash.

On the face of it, writing numbers is easy; either use the actual digits or spell them out in words. But when to choose which to use? In addition, you will have occasion to write times, dates, centuries and percentages and more.

In this lecture you will learn the accepted ways of writing numbers in your prose.

In this lecture I take a look at two closely related subjects: unnecessary words and fancy. We are in the business of getting our words down on paper, and take satisfaction from our growing word-count.

Unfortunately, a percentage of those words are simply not required and can be deleted. In the lecture we find which words are in this category, and how to handle their usage.

A beginner writer is looking for his or her own writing voice. Until this is found, there is a tendency to be too flowery with the words in chosen, using words that are just too fancy and don't add to the prose.

Everybody knows what an absolute is, which is a typical way to abuse absolutes. Of course, everybody doesn't know, but we use this kind of overgeneralization all the time (well, a lot of the time!)

Too many of these and your prose will suffer.

Clichés are incredibly attractive and that's why they pop up all over the place in our prose.

In this lecture you will learn what to do about it.

When you are close to the action of writing your story, it's easy to use favorite words again and again; too much in fact. I discuss how to track down this kind of writing behavior and look at strategies for dealing with it.

Interjections are part of natural speech, which is something that we try to approximate when writing prose. They can be useful in the right place, but incorrect usage will reduce the effectiveness of you story-telling.

In this lecture, interjections come under the magnifying glass and you will learn how to use them properly.

Vague writing isn't pleasant for the reader to follow, even if the prose and everything else is perfect. Boldness and directness are two of the pillars of great fiction, and vagueness needs to be rooted out.

Initial Coordinating Interjections - this is when a sentence begins with a word normally used to join two sentences together. Is it acceptable? In the second half of the lecture I will present the case for and against.

Imagine driving through a desert, with no trees or vegetation, and mind-numbingly flat. It would be a dull experience. Reading prose with no structural or emotional variety amounts to much the same thing.

In this lecture you will learn how to add this important characteristic to writing your prose.