Tag: edit
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The Red Pen: NaNoWriMo & Editing? Blasphemy! (Or not. Keep reading.)
I know what you’re thinking. This is NaNoWriMo! There’s no editing in NaNoWriMo! And you’re right. The whole point of it is to produce a 50,000 word manuscript in a month. That’s about 1,600 words a day, and nobody said they had to be great words. Or punctuated words. Or even grammatically correct words. 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: 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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Ernest Hemingway is Your Spirit Animal (or Probably Should Be)
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” – Ernest Hemingway I can get behind that. “Papa” Hemingway’s novels are masterpieces of verbal economy—perennial favorites on high school reading lists because of their brevity. You read Hemingway, and you just know he […]
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The Manuscript Diet
Looking to whittle down your word count? Here are three simple ways to cut the fat. Eliminate passive voice Remember this from elementary school? Passive voice is the difference between “The boy kicked the ball” and “The ball was kicked by the boy.” In the former, the subject (boy) is doing the action—in this case, […]
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