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Does that Word Make You Happy, Sad, or Mad?
One of the things I do for editing clients is question their word choices. My best example was when I convinced a client that she didn’t want to use the word “manifesto” on her website – even though she was using it correctly. I find that people’s brains tend to go to one of two…
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Punctuation for Clear Communication
I tell people that I edit for readability – and that readability is not always grammatically correct. I tell people that because I am not fluent in the formal terms of grammar. I don’t want to try to defend my edits based on participles, infinitives, dangling modifiers, or gerunds. (No matter how many times I…
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It Takes More than Just Words – What’s Really Involved when Writing
When people say, “I’m going to write a <fill in the blank>,” it is amazing how little they know about writing a <fill in the blank>. Most people think that all they need to do is sit down and write! OK, maybe it is not that bad. A large portion of the population understands that…
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Why Writing Needs Editing
OK, the obvious does apply here. Typos, misspellings, and bad grammar are the easy answers for why anything written needs editing. However, most spell/grammar checks will alert a writer to the worst of those. And going back over what you write can also catch a huge number of errors. And if that was my only…
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Editing Company or Editor?
I keep thinking about writing a blog on self-publishing, then I get a different idea. Today, my self-publishing research became sidetracked by the Book Editing Services page on the BookBaby website. BookBaby seems to be the Full-Service Self-Publishing company of choice these days. I’m sure there are others, but my searches, random readings, and the…
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Editing for Self-Publishing Authors
With plenty of variations on the theme, I see four general categories of authors who self-publish. They just want to publish something for their close friends and family. They have a story to tell, a message to share, that they hope will go beyond just their social media connections. Their book is a marketing piece…
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What Type of Editing do You Do?
This question used to drive me nuts. Most folks know that my “formal” training in putting words together is fairly minimal, so for a long time I didn’t know that there were different types of editors, let alone what they were called. Editing was just the process of making written text better – I didn’t…