Writing Christmas messages sounds simple enough. After all, how hard can it be to jot down a few heartfelt words on a card, text, or email? As it turns out, harder than you might think. How excited will your childhood friend, Ashley, be after receiving a card with “Merry Christmas” slapped on it for the tenth year in a row?
The challenge lies not just in finding the right words and avoiding clichés, but in matching your message’s tone to the relationship and format. “Thinking about you this holiday” might sound odd if addressed to your manager, for example, but perfectly fine for that friend you secretly wish were more than a friend.
In this guide, you’ll find tips for writing Christmas messages for friends, family, and coworkers, along with examples of inspirational, religious, funny, and short Christmas messages you can use in your cards or texts.
TipDon’t let typos and misspellings get in the way of spreading holiday cheer. Before you hit “send” or slip your card through the mailbox, run your message through QuillBot’s free Grammar Checker.
Whether you’re writing holiday cards, playing word games, or teaching seasonal vocabulary, a festive word list captures the spirit of December. From “Advent” to “Yule,” here’s a complete guide to holiday words and phrases for the season—grouped by themes for easy browsing.
Searching and applying for jobs can feel like a job itself, and building a strong resume is often the hardest task on the list. You want it to highlight your achievements, show measurable results, and pass Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) filters—all without spending hours rewriting every bullet point.
ChatGPT can help if you know which prompts to use. In this article, you’ll find ready-to-use ChatGPT resume prompts for every stage: writing your resume, refining details, tailoring it to specific roles, and proofreading, helping you get the most out of ChatGPT for resume writing.
A second-person point of view is a narrative technique where the writer uses the pronoun “you,” directly addressing the reader. This turns the reader into a character or even a protagonist in the story. Although uncommon in fiction writing, second-person narration often appears in video games, tabletop games, recipes, and instruction manuals, where giving direct instructions or choices makes sense.
Second-person point of view exampleYou wake up on a small wooden raft drifting down a wide, muddy river. Your clothes are damp, your pack is half-open, and your companions are still asleep. Up ahead, the black shape of a ruined fortress rises through the fog, its gates creaking open as if waiting for you.
A third-person point of view is when the narrator stands outside the story and refers to the characters by name or with pronouns like “he,” “she,” or “they.” This perspective offers a broader view of events, since the narrator knows what different characters think and feel. A third-person point of view can be limited or omniscient, depending on how much of this knowledge the author wishes to relate to the reader.
Third-person point of view example “I couldn’t care less,” she said, turning her gaze toward the window. Her hands clasped the pen tightly.
A first-person point of view (also known as first-person narrative or perspective) is when a story is told from a character’s own perspective using pronouns like “I,” “me,” “we,” and “us.” This type of narrative technique lets the audience “see” the story directly through the narrator’s eyes, creating intimacy and immersion. First-person narrators are common across literary genres, especially in detective novels and memoirs.
First-person point of view example: Dracula“I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then.”
Whether you’re writing a horror story, a gothic-inspired poem, or simply want to expand your vocabulary, learning a few scary words might come in handy.
We cracked open our dusty, leather-bound dictionaries, brushed away the cobwebs, and unearthed a list of 100 scary words that are sure to give you the heebie-jeebies.
Need help brainstorming spooky sentences or story ideas? Try QuillBot’s AI Chat—it’s the perfect writing companion for when inspiration strikes (or haunts) you.
Google Gemini has taken social media by storm, with millions of users turning everyday photos into viral edits. At the heart of this craze are Gemini prompts—the text instructions you give to Google’s AI to create, edit, or transform content.
Why do they matter? Because the quality of your prompt directly shapes the results. A vague request like “make this look better” won’t get you far, but a detailed prompt describing style, mood, colors, and specific elements can unlock Gemini’s full creative power. And with Google’s latest Nano Banana update inside the Gemini app, image prompts have become even more versatile, fueling trends like retro Bollywood posters, Diwali celebrations, Polaroid-style photo edits, and 3D toy transformations.
In this guide, we’ll break down what makes an effective Gemini prompt, explore the hottest edits—and share ready-to-use examples you can try right now.
You’re deep into the first pages of a gripping novel, completely absorbed into the world the author has built. The plot races forward, the characters feel genuine—until someone opens their mouth:
“Hello, Margaret. How are you feeling today? I am concerned about your well-being because yesterday you seemed quite distressed about the situation with your employment.”
You blink. Read it again. Nobody talks like that. Real people say things like, “Hey, you okay? You seemed pretty upset about work yesterday.” The spell is broken. You’re no longer in the story—you’re painfully aware you’re reading one.
Bad dialogue is like a speed bump in your reader’s mind. It jolts them out of the fictional dream and reminds them they’re holding a book, not experiencing a world. Great dialogue, on the other hand, disappears completely. Readers don’t even notice they’re reading words on a page because the characters feel so alive and their conversations so realistic that you become an invisible observer in their world.
Whether you’re figuring out how to write dialogue in a novel or even incorporating dialogue into an essay, the challenge remains the same: writing conversations that feel authentic to your setting and characters.
This guide will walk you through everything from proper formatting and punctuation rules to the secrets of making your characters sound like real people, not like they’re reciting from a textbook.
NoteIn British English, dialogue is the standard spelling for conversations in writing. In American English, dialog is mainly used in computing contexts, like a “dialog box” in software, though “dialogue” is still more common for everyday writing.
Tone and mood shape how we experience a story emotionally, but in different ways. While tone describes the author’s or narrator’s attitude, mood refers to the reader’s emotional response.
In this article, we’ll break down what tone and mood mean in literature, explain how they differ, and show how each works through clear examples.
