Quick, clean, and tight.
This is an art community, not a writers guild. Apples and oranges, but for those who care to improve their writing for comics, fiction/prose, or other work, always remember: good words, and the image they create, are worth their weight in paint or pixels.
The opposite holds true as well. Sloppy writing implies a lack of effort. And if your reader thinks you didn't care enough to polish your own work, then you're sure as hell not going to care enough to show them a good time.
For the most part, these rules apply to formal writing, but are nevertheless important to writing clearly and effectively in any setting.
dmorgan.web.wesleyan.edu/mater…Read it, memorize it, sleep with it, whatever. Even if English is your first language, you or someone you know will break one of these rules at some point. Do what you can to catch yourself. When it comes to prose, it is acceptable to break the rules if you demonstrate your knowledge of them first.
Also, as a matter of personal taste, along with mistakes I've made in the past:
1. Err on the side of saying too little. Sometimes you'll need a nice, long phrase, but it's a fast road to making your dialogue and descriptions bloated. For every word, ask yourself: do I
really need this? Is it crucial to my reader's understanding?
2. Leave something for your audience to imagine. Every detail you add is one less for the reader to enjoy in their own head. Do what you need to create a coherent sequence of events, and from there proceed with a critical eye.
3. For heaven's sake, get someone else to look at it and give honest feedback. It's next to impossible to view your work with any large amount of objectivity. You can't be confused by what you've written because
you wrote it.
One last thing: learn the rules for commas. As someone smarter than me pointed out, there's an important difference between:
"Let's eat, Grandma!"
and
"Let's eat Grandma!"