I’ve been working on my novel, and it ain’t easy. I’m a few thousand words in, but I’ve decided I need to sit down and create a more detailed storyline because I find myself all over the place in terms of tone and themes. There’s too much going on, and I need to get a… Continue Reading
Here’s a short story that comes complete with editing suggestions from professional editors. I read the story and made my own editing suggestions and then compared my ideas with those of the pros. As one might expect, there was some variation in opinion among the featured editors, but they agreed on the major problems with… Continue Reading
The sign in the above photo contains an error that I’m seeing, well, every day lately: everyday used as a noun. The store is “now open everyday.” But everyday is an adjective, as in everyday life, everyday clothes, everyday mistakes. Go forth with this wisdom, people, and correct the errors of our sorry textual ways.
I was spelling the word surreptitious the other day, and I had to grab the Canadian Oxford because something just didn’t look right. Sure enough, something wasn’t right: I had written surrepticious. Spelling matters. I would argue that text with several spelling errors—not merely typos—makes the writer look careless at best and unintelligent at worst.… Continue Reading