Therese Arkenberg: Writing and Editing
If you think I’m just going to sweep in here and blog again as if several years haven’t gone by…you’re exactly right. Let’s get to it. (What’s been happening? I’ve been doing a lot of editing work with my head in Word files rather than WordPress. Also living my life, volunteering, spending time with loved…
Today’s post is a coda to the series I’ve written over the past few weeks as an in-depth guide to the editing process. We talked about how an editor (or at least this editor) works, what’s involved in line editing and copyediting, and what a developmental or content edit looks at. Now I’ll tackle a…
Welcome to the third post of my guide to getting your story edited. I hope this explanation makes the process less intimidating by giving you an idea of what to expect. It might even make you excited to start work on your story’s next draft! Today, I’m going to talk about developmental editing, also known…
Welcome to the second part of my in-depth look at the editing process! Today, we’re going to look at the kinds of suggestions I make when working directly on manuscripts word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph (the more holistic feedback given in developmental editing will be the subject of my third…
Sending your story to an editor—especially if you’re new to the process, but also when you’ve been writing a long time—can induce anxiety and above all, uncertainty. What’s going to happen? What shape will the manuscript be in when you get it back? Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at my editing processes. First, I’ll talk about…
Today’s blog post is a brief explanation of why a sentence may be incomplete without some additional words. It will also help you figure out how to punctuate dialogue and the difference between “lie” and “lay.” (*Originally coined by the writers of The Simpsons, this delightful word for “acceptable” is now recognized by the dictionary!)…
After a few years away, I’ve started to revive this blog and some of my social media as a place to share writing and editing advice and publishing news. Perhaps I’ll also share some personal updates every now and then, but I view this space as mainly professional. I have other outlets for personal expression….
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While editing manuscripts, I often suggest revising sentences for more clarity or precision. A common reason is because the original version of the sentence had a “dangling modifier” or an uncertain “pronoun referent.” These terms might seem intimidating, but they don’t have to be. In this post, I’ll offer examples of what modifiers and referents…
This an update I actually should have shared over a month ago, but time got away from me. By which I mean, I misremembered “Ghostwitch’s” publication date in the online Two Thousand Word Terrors anthology as August instead of July, and I also have spent the summer in a fugue of work — editing, of…