Niles: But Miss Fine's age is only ... Fran: Young! Miss Fine's age is only young!

4. Excessive punctuation: Only one exclamation mark or question mark should be used at a time. Consider following over-punctuated examples:

Buy now!!! Great bargains!!!!!!!!!!

Excessive punctuation looks too much like hysteria and detracts from your credibility. Avoid it.

5. Headings: For long works, establish a clear hierarchy of headings. Microsoft Word's heading styles are great for this. (They also allow you to automatically create a table of contents.)

6. Hyphenating prefixes: Most prefixes don't need a hyphen; i.e. we write "coexist", not "co-exist". There are exceptions, though. The prefixes "self-" and "ex-" are almost always hyphenated.

7. Numbers: Numbers of ten or less are normally written as words.

8. Quotation marks: Users of American English should use double quotes (" "). Users of British English should choose either single quotes (' ') or double quotes and stick with them for whole document. Incidentally, British English usage is increasingly moving towards single quotes.

9. Spaces: Modern style is to use a single space at end of a sentence, not two. Also, most punctuation marks (e.g. commas, full stops, question marks) are not preceded by a space.

10.Tables: Set table text one or two points smaller than main body text and in a sans-serif font such as Arial or Verdana. Avoid vertical lines as they tend to add unnecessary clutter.

Armed with these simple guidelines, your writing should be well received every time. Good luck!

For starters, take a look at shelves in your favorite bookstore. How many books do you see in romance genre? in mystery genre? in sci-fi genre? Why is it every year, thousands of books just keep getting published? It's because writers and authors have this innate ability to fashion something out of an old theme and turn it into their own unique creations.

And if 100 writers bought same book, say a book on how to start their freelance writing careers, none of them would have exact experience as a result of having read same book. Their experiences would vary. Even if most of them achieved success, it would be in varying degrees.

Yes, there really isn't any original idea, much less a plot, left on earth that none of us hasn't thought of yet, written about, made money on, and proudly claimed as our own. The fact is, every idea has already been thought of by someone else, or has been simultaneously thought of by a number of people who have never even met.

Yet in spite of this, we continue to write. Hey, there might not be any original idea left on face of this planet but as writers, we have developed inventiveness to shape old stones and turn them into shiny diamonds, and none of them would have same number of facets.

There's no such thing as an original idea, but there are such creatures as writers with great and different doses of imagination, inventiveness and experience!