Worldbuilding often comes down the everyday details for the characters. Copyediting choices like capitalization, italics, and more can support your epic worldbuilding or undermine it and keep your reader at arm’s length. I put together a one-hour webinar (together with the American Copy Editors Society) to teach authors (and editors) how to better invite readers to see the world through a character’s eyes.
Worldbuilding Language Details
In this webinar, I don’t just discuss “correct” ways to treat invented terms, species, and items. I also talk about considering these worldbuilding elements from the view of your characters so you can better convey the characters’ relationship with those things to your readers. Because as cool as worldbuilding can be, it’s even cooler to see interesting characters interacting with that world!
The two things I discuss most in the webinar are capitalization and italic text, both of which I see overused a lot. I think some of this can come from some authors’ lack of confidence in themselves and their readers, so in the webinar I talk about ways to determine if something needs capitals or italics based on the way characters interact with that thing and how often a reader is going to interact with it.
Access the Webinar
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