Here’s how to make your computer help you find grammar and line editing problems. Awkward phrases, missing words, repeated words in close proximity, and repeated sentence length will be much more obvious and easier to identify to fix. It requires Word, WordPad and Excel. Plus a bit of computer skills, or, just follow the instructions closely and trust my advice. 🙂 # In late drafts we need to focus on […]
To help you edit, reverse your sentence order
Why is Writing Well so Difficult?
Why is writing well so difficult? It seems easy. When we talk, we don’t have difficulty communicating. On the other hand, our appraisal of our chatter is not strict, not until we have to make a speech or a presentation. And when we speak face to face we receive feedback—discussion, questions, body language—to check how well our message is coming across. Good writers make written communication seem natural, easy, almost […]
Editing Review: Stranger in a Strange Land
I’m reading Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, but not for the first time. Many, many years ago it was my ‘bible’; the good book that I read from before going to sleep. As an agnostic faux-intellectual college student I latched on to Heinlein’s unconvinced, usually cynical attitudes toward politics, government, society, and found solace in the advice of Jubal Harshaw and in the commune of the Nest. […]
Post-NaNoWriMo 2011, or, Begining the second version of the 3DayNovel
So I didn’t make the 20,000 words in eleven days to total 50,000 for my manufactured NaNoWriMo for this year, but I did manage to come up with close to 15,000, and have kept at it since then, though at a much slower pace. But after spending two weeks since then trying to add scenes to my original 23,000 word 3DayNovel I became aware that most of the new material […]