Thanks for explaining Mrs Dann… 😉

I don’t think I shall give to my credance to this particular reviewer. That said, I will look for proper examples of showing rather than telling when I get round to revising the beast as it is something that other people have said.

Your reviewer, I think, is confused about what ‘show and tell’ means. He (I’m presuming a ‘he’) seems to think it’s wrong to describe what people are doing – it’s not. What’s is not so good is to be told people’s *emotions* without showing them.

A good rule of thumb is that if you’re using the word ‘felt’, you’re telling (e.g. He felt scared, She felt worried, etc) – actions and dialogue should do the work of showing us that people are feeling particular emotions. In terms of telling/showing, there was nothing wrong with your original line, IMO.

Simple but good example I would say!

So if I wanted to make my example above a bit more showy, couldn’t I just put:

Ben pages through his book, studying the figures, scrawling notes on the backs of print-outs. Tapping in numbers to his calculator, trying to piece together the sums.

And then surely it’s a show not tell, present tense sentence?

A very simple example of tell -v- show :-

1. She felt cold, because it was very windy.

2. She shivered and pulled up the collar of her coat as a freezing gust of wind blew across the park.

OK, pretty crap example, but basically the first one is telling because the reader is being told the girl is cold, whereas in the second one we are shown her reaction to the cold.

Cool icon by the way! 🙂

Now quills, them were the days…

I’m glad I’m not the only one that was confused by this! I confess that I didn’t say anything in the post because I didn’t want to appear stupid, but I had the same thoughts. I read my original and then the re-write, and back, and back again and I saw it as present from past.

The show not tell thing, I am prepared to believe, as it’s something that I’ve been told by others (including yourself) but I couldn’t see it here. Can you give me a better example?