soft words in dusty corners

Vocabulary

01. Word hippo

02. One look

03. Power thesaurus

04. Visual thesaurus

Dialogue tags

01. 300 words to use instead of said

02. 550+ alternative words for said

03. 200+ other words for said

(These pictures are not mine. Let me know if you know OP!)

The final, brilliant word on passive voice.

“She was killed [by zombies.]” <— passive

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)

CreatingBlackCharacters also has a great post about AAVE if you should check out if your reading this and actually want to know more about AAVE, it IS a legitimate dialect, its existed for an incredibly long time, i grew up using it, i grew up hearing nearly every other Black person around me use it. Ive seen entire posts talking about words to hate and majority of them are always AAVE words, Woke is a good example of an AAVE word with a genuinely good meaning being completely decimated by white people online, now its either used by racists to call anything diverse bad or its used as a joke, its extremely frustrating how many people just do not take AAVE seriously. If you know what AAVE is and you still mock it, deny its legitimacy as a dialect or think its "cringe", that is infact, racist.