Scookie Reviews

My eyes are tired from reading so many psychological articles, but every so often something crops up and inspires the writer in me. Several studies have recently got me thinking about how our words create mental representations in the readers. Writers are master manipulators of metal representations, writing words for readers to picture. Most of us will use subtle tricks without realising or understanding the why or how, and research has uncovered a lot about reading which will help you put your finder on it. I'm here to point them out and put you back in charge. Time How your story progresses forward in time can have subtle effects on the readers. Even walking through a door or saying 'an hour later' is enough to elicit extra processes in the reader's mind without them being none the wiser. In real life, we remember events in our lives in little episodes such as, “The time we were chased by geese,” which may or may not have happened to me... The point is...

I asked you guys if you had any writing quibbles and you answered with a thought provoking question. “What are your opinions on said versus other dialogue verbs? I've heard from a few places that said should be used in the majority, or even totally, because it's a word that becomes invisible to the reader. Is there any evidence on that?” Readers will always have different sensitivities to taglines, but you’ll annoy less people by using 'said' too often than going mental on the fancy alternative verbs. My thoughts are to use exciting synonyms of ‘said’ sparingly so that they have the most effect when you do, but there's no reasons to boycott all alternatives. In my mind, ‘said’ is a device rather than a word, and research supports this idea. We don’t look at every word when we read. Instead we make jumpy eye-movements called saccades which often leave out small words and those which are highly predictable (blue moon, apple pie). We still process those words, ...