Graeme Brown spent his career in Australian education — first as a high-school mathematics teacher, then as an assistant principal — before moving into editing. In 2014 he co-founded Global English Editing with his son Brendan, and he shares oversight of editorial standards at The Expert Editor. He writes about the parts of writing that reward patience: the slow work of revision, how to actually finish a piece, and what reading widely over a lifetime teaches you about clear language. He brings a teacher's instinct for making ideas land with readers.
Before you read any further, try this. Think back to the last time you sent something you'd written, a chapter, a proposal, a full manuscript, off to be edited. What did you brace yourself for? Most writers I've asked over the years give some version of the same answer: ...Read More
Ask a roomful of writers what makes a sentence good, and most of them will land, sooner or later, on the same word: shorter. Cut it. Trim it. Get out before you've said too much. It's advice I've heard in newsroom style sheets, in composition classes, and in more editing ...Read More
A draft that comes together fast feels like a small triumph while it's happening. You sit down, the sentences arrive in something close to the right order, and an hour or two later there's a whole thing on the page where nothing was before. What that speed costs the ...Read More
A spell-checker is good at exactly one kind of mistake: the kind with a right answer. Misspell a word and it knows. Drop a verb and, most of the time, it flags the gap. But there's a whole category of comma decision that never trips an underline, because nothing ...Read More
Every so often a manuscript arrives with a research folder attached that's several times the length of the piece itself: interviews transcribed in full, a dozen papers annotated in the margins, whole books' worth of notes distilled down to a paragraph or two that actually made it onto ...Read More
Somewhere across the manuscripts I've turned back to writers over the years — a rough count puts it near forty, though I stopped keeping an exact tally a long time ago — a pattern eventually became hard to ignore. Almost none of them were rejected because the underlying idea ...Read More