Category: The Red Pen: Five-Minute Easy Edits
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A Matter of Perspective: POV, part 1
“Style,” said poet Richard Eberhart, “is the perfection of a point of view.” And he’s right—which is why determining the viewpoint of your story makes all the difference. Need to shake up your editing? Consider what effects different points of view might have on your readers. There’s a point of view for me… Example #1,…
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Go Set an Editor: What Harper Lee Can Teach You About Done-ness
*mild Go Set a Watchman spoilers in this post! Harper Lee is a beloved household name. Middle and high school kids all across America make friends with Scout and Jem and Dill as a rite of passage. Sleepy Maycomb seems to seep into the lives of everyone it touches somehow. (For real. I named my…
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The Red Pen: Perfectly Peculiar Punctuation
The rise of texting may have brought about the downfall of punctuation…but these rarely-used marks are sure to bring a little dash of whimsy to your manuscript. The Manicule It’s vintage! It’s retro! It’s…the manicule! Hipster writers will party like it’s 1599 if they bring back the manicule (☞), that little index finger-pointing hand that…
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The Red Pen: To pass, or not to pass…on passive voice
Passive (aggressive) voice might be appropriate for those mildly shade-throwing work emails that get CC’d to your boss, but should you nix it in your writing? What is passive voice? When we’re talking about voice in grammar, we’re talking about what part of a clause is on the receiving end of the action—the subject, or…
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The Red Pen: That is such a cliché
What they are I am an editor and an English teacher to the core. What this means is that I’ve been known to take love notes from the well-meaning suitors of my children and students, red pen them, and send them back. All’s fair in love and war, but not in writing: a comma splice…
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The Red Pen: Sentences…the long and the short of it
I sentence you to better control of your syntax. Perhaps you’ve seen this brilliant syntax exercise before from Gary Provost, sometimes called the “writer’s writer”: This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring.…
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The Red Pen: Dangling Modifiers
Dangling: good for trained soldiers in rescue missions, bad for modifiers. Pardon me, but your modifier appears to be dangling…. Dangling or misplaced modifiers are feats of grammatical ambiguity that can create awkwardness for writers. A modifier is a phrase, clause or word that provides description in a sentence. Dangling or misplaced modifiers occur when…
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The Red Pen: A Two-Step in Dialogue Tags
“How are you?” she breathed. “I think you know,” he thundered. “Really?” she drawled. “Really,” he growled. Feel like you need a cold shower after reading this (unintentionally) hot and melodramatic scene? That’s because of the poorly-used dialogue tags. Realistic dialogue is hard enough to write without having to worry about…
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The Red Pen: Sentence Solutions
The ability to craft beautiful sentences is a rare gift. The ability to wreak grammatical havoc on all things syntactic is, alas, far more common. Here are three common mishaps and a pocketful of solutions to your most common syntax sins. Offender #1: The Run-On When you connect independent clauses without punctuation or conjunctions, you’ve…
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Pitch Perfect in 3 Steps
“Are you crying?” Tom Hanks asks in A League of Their Own. “There’s no crying in baseball!” Maybe not in baseball…but certainly, many an author has shed tears over a pitch. So how do you turn your pitch into a home run? Step 1: Know Your Genre To say that your book is sci-fi is…
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