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
"The inability to 'see' revision as a process: the inability to 're-view' their work again, as it were, with different eyes." That is composition scholar Nancy Sommers, writing in 1980, long before anyone edited a manuscript inside a colored overlay of insertions and deletions. She was describing student writers ...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 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
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