Ask someone to list the punctuation marks in English and you'll get commas, periods, semicolons, maybe a colon if they're paying attention. What ties all of those together is the instruction each one carries. A comma tells a reader to slow down without stopping. A period tells them ...Read More
I ask writers to do one thing before they send me a manuscript they think is finished: read it aloud, start to finish, in a room where they can hear their own voice. Most haven't done it. Some resist the idea outright — it feels theatrical, or slow, or beside ...Read More
Most of the manuscripts that cross my desk use one horizontal mark for three different jobs. A writer will hyphenate a compound, punctuate an aside, and indicate a page range with the same little dash, usually because their keyboard makes the shortest one the easiest to reach and ...Read More
A writer reads a manuscript for the fourth time, satisfied it's clean, and sends it off. An editor opens it an hour later and finds six errors on the first page: a doubled "the," a wrong homophone, a sentence missing its verb. Nothing about the writer's care or competence ...Read More
Most writers who submit manuscripts for editing understand their argument. They know what they want to say. The chapters hold together, the reasoning is sound, the research is there. And yet the prose doesn't work. It resists the reader at every turn — not because the ideas are ...Read More
When a writer sends a finished manuscript for assessment, they usually expect one of two verdicts: it's ready, or it isn't. What they get back is neither. A manuscript assessment is not a mark out of ten and not a line edit. It is a reader's report — ...Read More