As I tell the authors whose books I edit, it’s relatively easy to write a whole book. You just do a mind dump. Then you hire me to help you clean it up. It’s that “cleaning it up” part that becomes a challenge. We tend to love our words, especially all those nifty adjectives and adverbs we find in the thesaurus and stuff into our sentences. But bloated sentences tend not to … [Read more...]
The Elements of Style
I don’t even know how long I’ve been sitting at this computer, or the computers before this one, or the typewriter before the first computer, or the legal pad before that. I was the only member of the Creative Writing Club in my high school to have a new story every single week. In college and graduate school, I kept writing. Mostly term papers, of course. I still have all my … [Read more...]