FLAWLESS GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT by Motsidi (Jay_Tsidi)
• Author of Scattered Stars
• The African Awards 2019 Winner.

All of the above is of great importance, it is almost as important as the storyline.

There is no such thing as flawless but it is important that you try to be as close as possible.

Grammar - the whole structure of a language, including the rules for the way words are formed and their relationship to each other in a sentence.

I don't know if I should really elaborate on this. Grammar is important or else what's the point? I really have no idea what else to say. Poor grammar equals to a train smash of a book. In order to improve your grammar, I highly recommend you read different types of media (newspapers, magazines or books).

Punctuation - the marks, such as full stop, comma, and brackets, used in writing to separate sentences and to make meaning clear.

Punctuation I feel is quite crucial. It determines the flow of your book and what certain sentences mean.

If there are no proper punctuations it could result in ambiguity.

If the commas are in the wrong place it could all mean different things. If multiple phrases are not separated they could all seem like one phrase or sentence and the initial meaning could be lost. Commas can be used to separate tones, moods and lists.

I am going to point out some of the most common and sometimes incorrectly used punctuation marks.

Commas and full stops.

A comma is commonly used to separate a list of items in a sentence or to separate phrases or clauses. A lot of time people don't use them enough and sometimes people use them too much. When there are multiple consecutive adjectives use commas. Eg

She was beautiful, tall, dark and curvaceous.

A comma also represents a two-second pause in your sentence so you need to ask yourself if you need a brief pause or you need to stop the sentence all together in which you would use a full stop.

Like I have mentioned with the comma sometimes people use full stops too much or too little. Don't write a paragraph of a hundred words with no full stop. And don't write too many short sentences. Short sentences are meant to deliver a punch of emotions, you can't really use that everywhere. Eg

She was dead. She was truly gone. I couldn't believe my eyes because blah blah...

Punch delivered.

Exclamation mark and question mark.

I feel they are self-explanatory but remember the exclamation mark is an interjection. It's meant to show an ardent response. And a question mark is great for rhetorical questions or witty sarcasm.

Quotation marks (inverted commas) "these things"

They are used to indicate direct speech (basically dialogue). They are used to show that the character is speaking and what the character is saying word for word. Please use them or else your reader won't know what your character is saying or if they are saying anything at all. Quotation marks and quotation marks only are used to indicated dialogue (generally) depending on your country they could be something like this "blah" or 'blah' or ''blah''.

When your character quotes someone in their speech or dialogue you can use 'apostrophes' or italics.

Italics is probably one of the most incorrectly used typefaces.

DO NOT WRITE YOUR WHOLE BOOK IN ITALICS!

Italics are used to emphasis something. It is used to differentiate between languages used in a book. Used as a parenthesis. It can also be used to indicate if something is an example. Used for direct speech (even though I do not recommend it). It is not some fancy type of writing, when something is in italics your eye is immediately drawn to it and it is meant to be. Some people use it for flashbacks which is fine as well or a brief self-reflection or internal dialogue.

(I cringe when an entire book is written in italics)

Brackets () are for parenthesis plain and simple. They are almost always used to represent an afterthought or just an extra piece of information, not an entire chapter.

Ellipsis ...
They show that some information has been left out or they represent a dramatic pause. They are essentially for drama like if your character hesitates in the middle of their dialogue or if you want to end something on a cliffhanger.

If you don't understand or genuinely don't know about any of the aforementioned I recommend downloading Grammarly it's an app that helps you with your grammar and punctuation when writing, I use the app myself it makes writing a whole lot easier. It corrects your spelling, grammar and punctuation.

You can also download Poet Assistant even though it's for writing poetry it's a handy app for definitions, thesaurus and rhyming words. The app sends you a new word every day that you can learn so it improves your vocab too. Reading will also help with your vocabulary.

I hope it helps, this is just textbook English.