Over the years, I’ve shared many resources with my friends and editing clients, as well as learning from them myself. Here’s an ever-growing list of the books and articles I’ve found most helpful. I deliberately list them in no particular order. Some are more about writing a first draft; some more about editing or marketing….
Category: Editing
The Essential Information: A Quick Grammar Guide to Restrictive Commas and “That” vs “Which”
Punctuation can get confusing, but when used well, it’s a guide to meaning. Those subtle marks on the page give the reader plenty of context about how the words and ideas fit together. Today’s blog post will help you figure out whether to use commas around certain phrases, and which word choice is best, based…
What Happens When My Manuscript Gets Edited? Part Four: Disagreement and Clarification with Your Editor
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…
What Happens When My Manuscript Gets Edited? Part Three: Developmental and Structural Editing
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…
What Happens When My Manuscript Gets Edited? Part Two: Copyediting and Line Editing
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…
What Happens When My Manuscript Gets Edited? Part One: Behind the Scenes of the Editing Process
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…
Lay It On Me: A Quick Grammar Guide to Transitive vs Intransitive Verbs
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!)…
What do you mean? A Quick Grammar Guide to Pronoun Referents and Dangling Modifiers
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…
The Priority Edit
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…
Open to new projects!
I visited this blog the other day, probably to get the link to my article “12 Words to (Almost Always) Cut” (which today I’d title something more like “12 Words to (Almost Always) Replace” or “12 Words to Watch Out For,” though with the latter I’d lose the cheeky use of two of those twelve…