Page 56

Making Your Writing Stronger

1. Show, don’t tell. 🟪  When you are able to make readers feel, hear, smell, taste, or see things through your writing, you are “showing” rather than “telling.” In Charlotte’s Web, author E. B. White describes the barn where Wilbur the pig and his spider friend, Charlotte, live. White uses showing details to place his readers right there with Charlotte and Wilbur:

  It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. . . . And whenever the cat was given a fish head to eat, the barn would smell of fish.