Writing Tools

Best dictation software of 2024

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From Tech Radar:

The best dictation software makes it simple and easy to record audio notes on your desktop or mobile device.

It also allows you to speak instead of typing and converts your spoken words into text. This can save you a lot of time and energy and is very useful for anyone who might have difficulty typing for any period, such as those with RSI or a disability.

Although dictation software has been around since the 1990s, it was mostly seen as a gimmick due to low accuracy. However, technological advancements have made them more accurate and usable; you can now dictate text with accuracy levels of over 90%.

The most popular office software, Word, comes with a built-in speech-to-text converter, and it’s back engine has almost certainly been helped by Microsoft’s purchase of the Dragon software company, which leads the field when it comes to dictation software for all applications. Apple and Google also provide similar options for their software platforms.

. . . .

Dragon Professional Individual

Dragon Professional Individual dictation software is widely recognized as the best in the business. Dragon products are reliable, easy to use, and among the most accurate available.

Having used Dragon dictation software on our laptop, we can attest to its best-in-class performance. In a 300 word test, the software got 299 words correct. 

Like most advanced dictation software platforms, Dragon software leverages deep learning technology and artificial neural networks. These technologies enable Dragon to adjust its transcription based on several factors, such as the amount of ambient noise, the speaker’s accent, and even the tone with which they speak. 

For businesses, several Dragon dictation products may be suitable. This is because Dragon has gone beyond merely offering one software package for all purposes, and has created dictation software custom-designed for specific industries. The most popular are Dragon Legal, Dragon Medical One, and Dragon Law Enforcement. 

The biggest downside of Dragon dictation software is the substantial cost for a license.

. . . .

Microsoft Word speech to text

Although not a standalone dictation software platform, we believe Microsoft Word’s dictation functionalities merit a spot on this list. Built directly into Microsoft Word, and included with all Microsoft 365 subscriptions, it is a powerful and accurate dictation tool. 

The platform relies on vast amounts of training data and artificial neural networks, meaning it is continuously improving its ability to transcribe voice to text. Having tested Microsoft’s dictation software, we’re confident it competes in accuracy and ease of use with the leading dictation software providers. 

There are few standout features to mention, but we see this as a strength. Microsoft Word’s dictation software is straightforward to use, with no setup or installations required. It is accessible directly from the Word application, and it only takes one click to begin voice typing. 

Several voice commands enable you to take control of the document. These include punctuation marks and formatting tools. 

A final thing we like about Microsoft Word’s speech to text software is its support for nine different languages, with many more in the testing stage.  

. . . .

Google Docs Voice Typing

Google Docs is a popular online world processor offered by Google, the tech giant best known for its search engine. It works just like Microsoft Word but online instead of a desktop app. It’s also free to use, so you don’t have to pay any extra fee for a dictation tool. 

Google Docs allows you to type with your voice. When you open the software, just select Tools > Voice Typing and give it access to your device’s microphone. Then, you can click the pop-up microphone button anytime you want to dictate text. During our test, it was very accurate and typed in the correct words that were dictated. Just ensure you speak loudly and legibly because little pauses and stutters can confuse it. 

All you need to use Google Docs is a working Google account. There’s no setup or installation required; you just have to sign in and open a new document. The drawback is that you can not use the voice typing feature offline. 

. . . .

How We Tested the Best Dictation Software

To test for the best dictation software we first set up an account with the relevant software platform, whether as a download or as an online service. We then tested the service to see how the software could be used for different purposes and in different situations. The aim was to push each dictation software platform to see how useful its basic tools were and also how easy it was to get to grips with any more advanced tools.

Link to the rest at Tech Radar

The OP includes information about other dictation programs beyond the three mentioned above plus a more detailed review of Dragon Professional, MS Word and Google Docs.

Feel free to share your experiences with dictation software in the comments.

How To Dictate Your Book

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From The Creative Penn:

The word ‘writing’ has become associated with hitting keys on a keyboard to make letters appear on a screen or inscribing by hand onto paper. But the end result is a mode of communication from one brain to another through the medium of words. Those words can be generated by your voice, just as people can ‘read’ by listening to an audiobook.

Famous authors who have written with dictation include diverse creatives John Milton (Paradise Lost), Dan Brown, Henry James, Barbara Cartland and Winston Churchill. When Terry Pratchett, fantasy author of the Discworld series, developed Alzheimer’s Disease, he found he couldn’t write anymore, so he moved to dictation in his final years.

. . . .

So, why dictate?

(1) Health reasons

You can dictate standing up or while walking, or lying in bed with injuries, or if pain stops you typing.

I started using dictation when I had RSI and used it to write the first drafts of Destroyer of Worlds and also Map of Shadows, plus some chapters for this book, which I dictated while walking along the canal towpath.

(2) Writing speed and stamina

Dictation is faster at getting words on the page than typing, especially if you are not self-censoring.

I’ve made it up to around 5000 words per hour with dictation, while I only manage around 1500 words per hour typing.

There is a trade-off with ‘finished’ words as you will have to at least lightly edit to correct transcription issues, but if you want to get that first draft done faster, then dictation can be the most effective way.

(3) Increased creativity

Some writers have a problem with perfectionism and the critical voice in a first draft. They struggle to finish a book because they are constantly editing what they have written.

If you dictate, you can bypass this critical voice, get the first draft done and then edit it later.

. . . .

What’s stopping you dictating?

There are a number of reasons why people resist dictation. I know them all because I’ve been through this journey several times!

The most common are:

• “I’m used to typing. I don’t have the right kind of brain for dictation.”

• “I don’t want to say the punctuation out loud. It will disrupt my flow.”

• “I write in public so I can’t dictate.”

• “I have a difficult accent which will make it impossible.”

• “I write fantasy books with weird names which won’t work.”

• “I don’t know how to set it up technically.”

• “I can’t spare the time to learn how to dictate.”

Here’s what I wrote in my journal on the first day I tried dictation before I’d actually even started.

“I’m very self-conscious. I’m worried that I won’t be able to find the words. I’m so used to typing and creating through my fingers that doing it with my voice feels strange.

But I learned to type with my fingers, so why can’t I learn to type with my words? I just have to practice. Something will shift in my mind at some point, and it will just work. This should make me a healthier author, and also someone who writes faster.

Authors who use dictation are writing incredibly fast. That’s what I want. I want to write stories faster as I have so many in my mind that I want to get into the world.”

Here are thoughts from my journal after the first session:

“It felt like the words were really bad and the story clunky and poor. But actually, when the transcription was done and I edited it, it really wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. A classic case of critical voice.

I need to ignore this when I’m dictating. I definitely need to plan the scene more before I speak it, which will save time overall in both dictation and editing.

I did think I would find the punctuation difficult, but that has also been easier than I thought. There are only a few commands that you use regularly, and dialog is the worst but you get into a rhythm with that. It also gives you a pause between each speaker to consider what they might say next, so perhaps it is a blessing in disguise. For the Indian character names, I am just using an easy placeholder word that I will go back and fix later.”

Link to the rest at The Creative Penn

It appears that Joanna created this blog post and video about six years ago. PG plans to see if he can find anything about technology updates that may be relevant to authors who may want to experiment with dictation.

Here’s a video in which Joanna describes how she dictates her books.

Authors who dictate

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From Sathyanand’s Blog:

“The Greek poet Homer (probably) dictated the entire Iliad and Odyssey because, according to tradition, he was blind.” ~ says Michael M. from Daily Writing Tips.

Dame Agatha Christie dictated perhaps half of her 66 famous mystery novels. Science fiction writer Kevin J. Anderson says, “It’s been about fifteen years since I gave up the keyboard and took up a recorder for my first drafts.” He is the author of 56 bestsellers, with more than 23 million books in print worldwide.

Legendary writer Sidney Sheldon wrote all his 18 novels by dictating. “Each morning from 9 until noon, I had a secretary… I wrote each morning — or rather, dictated — and then I faced the TV business.” On the best days, he dictates close to 50 pages.

Link to the rest at Sathyanand’s Blog

Are You A Dictator? Then Philips’ New Integration with Nuance Dragon’s AI Speech Recognition May Be for You

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From LawSites:

I am not a dictator (although some in my family may at times disagree). But I know that, for many lawyers and legal professionals, dictation is the only way to go. If you are one of them, you may want to check out the integration announced today by Philips Dictation of Nuance Dragon’s AI-powered speech recognition into the Philips SpeechLive dictation platform.

Philips SpeechLive, owned by the company Speech Processing Solutions, is a browser- and mobile-based dictation and transcription product for converting speech to text. The product, which also includes tools for routing and managing transcriptions, is used by a number of law firms.

With today’s announcement, SpeechLive now integrates Nuance Dragon, which has been a long-time leader in dictation software for the legal profession. The integration brings enhanced AI-driven speech recognition with software that continuously learns and becomes more accurate with use.

. . . .

Among the features enabled through this integration:

  • Specialized legal vocabularies. User can access tailored legal vocabularies for greater precision in transcription.
  • Custom profiles. Speech profiles can be personalized for to enhance efficiency and reduce repetitive corrections.
  • Personalized user recognition that uses adaptive learning to optimize transcription accuracy, tailored to individual preferences.
  • Real-time speech recognition. Integration of the Dragon Bar enables users to dictate directly into applications, such as Word documents or client management systems.

Link to the rest at LawSites

PG was an early adopter of Dragon’s early dictation system a very long time ago. It didn’t work very well.

However, in his law office, he dictated most of the documents that he couldn’t create with his home-brew document assembly system. His secretaries were very talented at cleaning up some of the documents he had dictated badly.

He also dictated requests to call the court clerk’s office to find out the status of court filings, etc., etc., etc. He hired the smartest secretaries he could find and paid them significantly more than the local going rate so they would stay around a long time. When a big check would arrive, he often paid his secretaries part of the windfall. Hiring and keeping smart people paid off very nicely for him.

PG remembers reading that a successful author dictated the first drafts of his novel for transcription a long time ago. He doesn’t recall who it was, but perhaps the name will float into his mind from the cloud or some similar source.

Using Beat Sheets to Slant Your Memoir’s Scenes

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From Jane Friedman:

Most memoirs involve some kind of loss—a breakup, a displacement, a dismantled dream, the death of someone dearly loved. The more painful the event, the more you’ll want to write about it. But as you revise, you’ll discover that some (or many) of your scenes aren’t needed.

To figure out what’s important, and how to write about it, you need to identify your memoir’s beats. Beats are part of the Beat Sheet tool Blake Snyder created for his book Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. These turning points work together to create a propulsive story that largely follows the hero’s journey—though once you understand the concept, you can apply it to other kinds of stories, like the heroine’s journey.

While it can be easy to spot the beats in a memoir with a clear quest, even nonlinear memoirs have them. Identifying both the beats and their functions can help you slant your material so that your book includes the right details in the right place to tell the right story.

Let’s say your book involves a breakup. Early drafts might include your courtship, the moment when you truly committed, the initial cracks in the relationship, the fights that led to the big eruption that ended everything, and all the post-breakup things your ex did that thoroughly miffed you.

This is a great start, but even when the relationship plays a prominent role, it’s likely you’ll need to trim things down. Before cutting too many darlings, or giving your book a full on weed whack, you’ll need to identify your book’s narrative arc, or the arc of internal transformation that happens within the narrator. Creating a beat sheet populated with your book’s key moments can help you identify how your narrator changes and which scenes illustrate this transformation.

If we continue with the breakup example, a beat sheet might uncover that your book is a harrowing tale of abuse where the breakup is a moment of victory that wraps up your book. But maybe you’ll discover that you’re actually writing about something else, and the breakup is either an unfortunate (or welcome) casualty of the primary story, or maybe the breakup is simply a catalyst that launches your journey.

Once your narrative arc is clear, you can decide how much real estate the relationship deserves, where the breakup belongs, and how to frame it so that it serves a specific function. To help you see what this looks like, let’s explore how breakups are framed in four different memoirs. (Warning: spoilers ahead!)

Breakup as ordinary world

Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, is about what she discovers about life, love, and herself after divorce. Her ordinary world, or the world before the quest begins, is one where a woman realizes she wants out of her marriage. Her divorce is important, because it sets the stage for what comes next, but it’s not the story, nor is it the catalyst inviting her on her journey.

In one of the book’s opening scenes, Elizabeth presses her head to the floor and realizes she doesn’t want to be married any more. Then, within the first 35 pages of her memoir—during which she gets divorced and has an unhealthy relationship with another man—she decides to travel to Indonesia after being invited by a medicine man (the story’s catalyst). Little of Gilbert’s marriage or divorce makes it into the book.

But what if the relationship takes on a larger role? How might that change the location and slant the breakup takes?

Breakup as opening for something new

According to Blake Snyder, your midpoint can either be an up moment where “the hero seemingly peaks” or a “low point where the world collapses around them.”

Suzette Mullen’s new memoir, The Only Way Through Is Out, is about risking it all to become who you truly are. It’s an identity story where one of her primary conflicts is whether to stay in her 30-year marriage. The decision to leave happens around the midpoint. Initially, it seems like a victory that makes room for her to pursue what she hopes will be a more authentic life. Then, a discovery about her ex occurs at the All Is Lost moment, which sends her life into a tailspin.

Breakup as unraveling

Divorce also plays a prominent role in Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas, a memoir about her second husband. Many writers hope to emulate this book because of the rules it breaks around chronology and point of view. But the story works precisely because it includes a whiff of narrative arc around her relationship with Husband Number Two. In fact, the book’s short vignettes largely chronicle their courtship and marriage, divorce, and reconciliation. Because the whiff of arc exists, it’s possible to identify the book’s beats.

The breakup in Safekeeping also takes place around the midpoint, but unlike Suzette’s false victory, it’s a deep low that Abigail briefly, yet specifically, describes. She stops cleaning, caring, or wearing anything other than her nightgown. Her children scatter. On days when she’s supposed to look for work, she smokes cigarettes, drinks coffee, and wanders, feeling completely lost. It’s so lonely, she welcomes back the raccoons she’d once complained about.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

Exploring the structure of Freytag’s Pyramid

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From NowNovel.com:

Storytelling is at the heart of our human interactions. We tell stories when we talk to each other, explaining what has happened in our lives. We also pay money to consume stories in the form of movies, theatre, books and so on. So many stories use the Freytag’s Pyramid (or Triangle) method, and it’s worth looking at it in detail to see how you can use it in your own writing. Understanding the plot structure is a good way of engaging readers and creating compelling narratives.

So, what is Freytag’s Pyramid (or Triangle) and how can you use it to write fiction? Let’s explore this in more detail. You may have heard of it, as it’s a literary analysis mode that is spoken of often when exploring creative writing. It was named after Gustav Freytag, a 19th century German novelist and playwright who first devised it.

What is Freytag’s Pyramid?

Simply put the Freytag Pyramid is a narrative structure that breaks down a story arc into five sections or five acts. The five-act structure looks like this:

  • exposition
  • rising action
  • climax
  • falling action
  • resolution/denouement 

Freytag’s Pyramid is so called as it falls into a pyramid structure.

It’s a helpful way to order the series of events and plot your stories, and will ensure you have a recognisable beginning, middle and end in your story. It’s super useful to consult it. So many stories naturally follow this pattern anyway, as we’ll see in the examples below, and it’s good to have to it to hand and make a study of it. It’s an excellent way to figure out how a story unfolds. Using it helps you create a logical progression of events, and gives readers a sense of familiarity and satisfaction. 

It’s important to note that although Freytag’s Pyramid is an extremely useful tool to use, be aware of the fact that it might not fit every story structure.

First, though, it’s important to note that although Freytag’s Pyramid is an extremely useful tool to use, be aware of the fact that it might not fit every story structure. Freytag devised his pyramid by looking at classical Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama and observing how these plays were constructed. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, was the first person to say that the structure of drama is shaped like a pyramid with a beginning, middle and end, what is known as the three-act story structure. 

The downside is well explained on Reedsy:

Make no mistake: Freytag’s pyramid is not a one-size-fits-all structure. It identifies story elements that are common to classical and Shakespearean tragedies, including a revelation or plot twist that changes everything — resulting in catastrophe for the hero. As a result, the pyramid is less applicable to non-tragic narratives in which the protagonist usually wins out in some way, or when writing more upbeat genres like comedy.

Exposition

This is where the stage is set: the author introduces the main characters, setting and milieu of the story. It’s here that the characters’ backgrounds, motivations and circumstances are introduced. This is also where, most likely, you will show the reason for the story. In other words, in this section the writer will establish the central conflict or problem that the protagonist will face in the story.

Thematic concerns will be introduced here as well, as well as hints of what character development might occur in the narrative.

Your exposition should end with the ‘inciting incident’ – that’s what will start the ball rolling in the narrative, or set off the events of your story.

Rising action

The inciting incident occurs in this section. Ideally this section should occur quite early in your story. You don’t want to have reams of exposition here. You can always weave in backstory and more as the story progresses. The inciting incident is the event that disrupts the status quo and sets the main conflict of the story in motion. The protagonist is now faced with a problem, challenge or dilemma that they must solve.

Link to the rest at NowNovel.com

Diagram a Sentence

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PG asked ChatGPT4 to do something with the first line from The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed.

Prompt: Diagram the following sentences: ‘The King is dead. Long live the Queen.” The announcer’s voice crackles from the wireless and winds around the rapt patrons of Berlin’s Milk Bar as sinuously as the fog curls around the mournful street lamps, their wan glow barely illuminating the cobblestones.”

ChatGPT4: To diagram the given sentence, we’ll break it down into its constituent parts, focusing on the main clauses, subordinate clauses, phrases, and key parts of speech. The sentence can be diagrammed as follows:

  1. Main Clause: “The announcer’s voice crackles from the wireless”
    • Subject: “The announcer’s voice”
    • Verb: “crackles”
    • Prepositional Phrase: “from the wireless”
  2. Subordinate Clause: “as sinuously as the fog curls around the mournful street lamps”
    • Conjunction: “as”
    • Adverb describing how the voice crackles: “sinuously”
    • Comparative Conjunction: “as”
    • Subject: “the fog”
    • Verb: “curls”
    • Prepositional Phrase: “around the mournful street lamps”
  3. Additional Phrase: “their wan glow barely illuminating the cobblestones”
    • Possessive Pronoun: “their”
    • Subject: “wan glow”
    • Verb: “illuminating”
    • Direct Object: “the cobblestones”
    • Adverb modifying the verb: “barely”
  4. Independent Sentences: “‘The King is dead. Long live the Queen.'”
    • These are two separate declarative sentences.
  5. Contextual Setting: “winds around the rapt patrons of Berlin’s Milk Bar”
    • Verb: “winds”
    • Prepositional Phrase: “around the rapt patrons”
    • Prepositional Phrase: “of Berlin’s Milk Bar”

In this diagram, each part of the sentence is broken down to show the structure and how different elements are connected. This visualization helps in understanding the grammatical structure and the relationships between different parts of the sentence.

END ChatGPT4

PG will leave the task of assessing how the AI did on this challenge to visitors who still remember what a “Direct Object” is. He doesn’t remember Mrs. Lascelles ever saying anything about “contextual settings.”

PG was expecting to receive a graphical diagram to be created by the prompt, like the following example:

PG speculates that the AI doesn’t have the ability to output graphic diagrams. (Yet)

Words fail us, and this writer knows it. How she is bringing people to the (grammar) table

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From USA Today:

Ellen Jovin is not the grammar police.

She’s more like a grammar guru, a gentle, nonjudgmental guide who knows English isn’t etched into a linguistic stone, rigid and unchangeable. Instead, she knows it’s a living, evolving thing whose rules are subject to the wants, needs and whims of those who speak and write it.

Though she is hardly a Strunk & White scold, Jovin is so invested in English as an interactive pursuit that she has not only written a book about it (“Rebel With a Clause,” HarperCollins), but she’ll also set up a table just to talk shop, answer questions or geek out with fellow word nerds. Her husband, Brandt Johnson, also a writer, is working on a documentary film about the Grammar Table.

“I treasure everything about language,” Jovin said. And she enjoys sharing that passion with others, no matter their own relationship to words. “It’s about love for the language in all the forms it comes to us − slang, departures from traditional grammar, what words mean and how that can change. It’s fun.”

Jovin has taken the Grammar Table to all 50 states since 2018 (she has stops planned for Gilbert and Mesa, Arizona, in February) and is often in parks in New York City, where she lives. A longtime educator, consultant and writer, Jovin started the Grammar Table as a way to get away from a computer screen − where grammatical rules have degraded almost as much, it seems, as personal and political discourse.

. . . .

Jadene Wong is one of the people Jovin has connected with (yes, Jovin said, it’s fine to end a sentence with a preposition). A pediatrician at Stanford University and “self-admitted grammar nerd,” Wong loved “Rebel With a Clause” so much that she found the author’s website and reached out via email. She was delighted when Jovin wrote back.

Wong thinks so highly of Jovin − and grammar, apparently − that she took time out of her vacation in Hawaii to talk to USA TODAY. When she visits New York, she finds out where Jovin will be with the Grammar Table and makes a point of stopping by to talk.

“Her writing is so humorous and fun,” said Wong, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area. “She knows the rules, but she also goes with the times and the trends. She’s not a person who says, ‘You have to do this or you have to do that.’ She wants to know, ‘What would you do?’ She knows modern language. She’s not like your old schoolteacher.”

One thing Jovin does that’s reminiscent of an old schoolteacher, though, is diagramming sentences. Her Instagram, @grammartable, includes posts from her travels as well as a couple of quick diagrams of pop songs’ lyrics, including Pink Floyd’s grammatically challenged “Another Brick in the Wall” and Vampire Weekend’s salty song “Oxford Comma.”

And if you think diagramming is a relic as old as a ruler-wielding Catholic school nun, think again.

Ninth grade students at High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx learn how to diagram sentences as part of their English curriculum, said the school’s principal, Alessandro Weiss.

Jovin visited the school last year and will be back again this year.

“Ellen is excited about language,” Weiss said, and that’s something HSAS educators want students to share. “We want our students to find joy in language and to understand how it’s open to change.”

Diagramming not only helps students understand sentence structure and grammatical rules, but it also illustrates how much precision matters. Students can see misplaced modifiers, stray prepositions and the dreaded dangling participle more easily when it’s mapped out on a series of straight lines.

Link to the rest at USA Today

Character Type & Trope Thesaurus Entry: Lady of Adventure

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From Writers Helping Writers:

DESCRIPTION: This self-sufficient and tenacious woman seeks out adventure and new discoveries, often breaking with the conventions of her time to do so.

FICTIONAL EXAMPLES: Arya Stark (Game of Thrones), Eowyn (the Lord of the Rings trilogy), Mulan (Mulan), Dolores Abernathy (Westworld), Lara Croft (Tomb Raider)

COMMON STRENGTHS: Adaptable, Adventurous, Alert, Bold, Confident, Courageous, Curious, Decisive, Efficient, Enthusiastic, Focused, Independent, Industrious, Passionate, Perceptive, Persistent, Resourceful, Spontaneous, Spunky

COMMON WEAKNESSES: Cocky, Impatient, Impulsive, Irresponsible, Obsessive, Pushy, Rebellious, Reckless, Self-Destructive, Self-Indulgent, Stubborn, Uncooperative, Volatile

ASSOCIATED ACTIONS, BEHAVIORS, AND TENDENCIES
Being street smart
Restlessness; needing to be on the move
Lacking patience
Thinking for herself
Rejecting the conventions that don’t suit her
Persistently pursuing her goals; seeing things through
Disregarding people in authority—specifically those who would try to force her into a specific role or keep her from certain activities
Spontaneity
Avoiding long-term commitments (in case a better offer comes along)
Believing that romantic entanglements will slow her down

SITUATIONS THAT WILL CHALLENGE THEM
A romantic partner wanting to settle down
Sustaining an injury that affects her mobility
Getting pregnant
Rules changing that restrict women’s freedoms
Being saddled with additional responsibilities at home or work, making travel and adventure less possible

TWIST THIS TROPE WITH A CHARACTER WHO…
Has a stable home life, with children
Is elderly
Has an atypical trait: indecisive, nature-focused, sentimental, verbose, whiny, vain, etc.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

For more information about various character tropes, check out the Thesaurus Description Database which you can find via the Writers Helping Writers Home Page.

Here, Here! vs. Hear, Hear!

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From The Grammarly Blog:

If you want to voice your agreement with someone during a debate (especially if you’re a member of the UK Parliament), you will shout “hear, hear.” But as long as you’re shouting, no one will notice you’re wrong if you shout “here, here” because the words are pronounced the same.

The United Kingdom has a long and proud history of parliamentarism. The current incarnation of the country’s Parliament, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, has a history that can be traced through its predecessors, the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of England, all the way to the early thirteenth century. As is often the case with places and institutions that have a long tradition, we can find relics of the past that persist in modern times. For instance, MPs are still offered snuff before they enter the Chamber. There is still some use of Norman French in the legislative process. And MPs still shout “hear, hear” when they agree with something one of them has said.

Link to the rest at The Grammarly Blog

The Easy-ish Way to Create Believable, Unforgettable Fictional Worlds

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From Writer Unboxed:

Worldbuilding gets a bad rap sometimes. If you ask certain people, worldbuilding is either for nerds looking for almanacs, not fiction, or it’s a useless distinction that should be an intrinsic part of writing.

But there are plenty of writers who recognize the essential nature of worldbuilding separate from the act of storytelling—for science fiction and fantasy, sure, but also for all genres. And there are a ton of amazing, detailed guides to creating worlds. But years ago, when I was first looking to build out the world I had created for my first foray into fantasy writing, I looked up resources for worldbuilding and quickly got bogged down in the sheer number of details these guides wanted me to know.

These guides offer hundreds of questions about the world you’re creating, insinuating that answering each one will lead to developing a believable, original world. I found weeks-long online courses dedicated solely to building a world from scratch.

I like to call these types of resources sandboxes. They give you lots of blank space to play around. “Where are the mountain ranges in your world?” they ask. “What military tactics does each nation in your world use?”

These are good questions, depending on the type of story you’re writing. Sandboxes are fun places for free play and for letting the mind run wild.

But once I had determined the election procedures of a specific political party in my book, which was decidedly not about election procedures or political parties, I was left no closer to a better story. I wondered: “…Now what? What does this have to do with my story?”

This is how I came to begin thinking about story-first worldbuilding.

Story-first worldbuilding falls somewhere on the worldbuilding opinion spectrum between “almanac” and “intrinsic” by exploring the details of the world around the story you want to tell. You don’t need to know where every mountain range is in your world unless your characters intend to cross them. What follows are a set of exercises that are geared mainly toward writers of fantasy who are creating secondary worlds, but hopefully applicable to all writers. The goal of these exercises to help you build a believable world that will add depth and color to the story you want to tell—without making you spend hours writing out the dominant flora on a continent your story will never visit.

How to Build a World Around the Story You Want to Tell

To complete the following exercises, I will assume that you have at least a smidgen of a story idea in mind. It’s okay if it’s not a fully fleshed-out plot yet. I will also assume that, since you have a story idea, you also have a vague impression of the world in which it’s set. It’s okay if most of the world is a blurry mess at this point.

This section contains a couple of exercises to get your mind thinking about how your world interacts with your story. The exercises are intended to be done in order, but this isn’t school. Do what’s most helpful to you.

Exercise #1: Write down everything you already know about your story’s world.

Set a timer for five, 10, or 30 minutes—however much time you think you need—and write out everything you already know about the world in which your story takes place, stream-of-consciousness style. Focus on the parts of your story you’ve either written or can picture clearly in your head. For example, if you know a critical scene in the climax involves an escape from a desert prison, write, “There’s a prison in the desert.” Do not consult Wikipedia’s list of desert flora and fauna. Even if you list things that are contradictory or illogical, write them all down anyway. Give yourself permission to let your mind run free. Important: This is not the time to make up new things about your world. If new ideas come to mind as you’re writing, don’t stop to examine them—just write them down and keep going.

When your time is up, read back over what you wrote. What are the things that are intrinsic or critical to your story and/or characters?

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed