Things Writers Do That Irk Me Here are my editing pet peeves: I’m more than willing to overlook a few of these mistakes and be extra tolerant of new writers, but when these things occur too often, it’s often easier to just reject the submission. I hope this helps. Whew, I feel better having gotten […]
How concerned should we be over passive sentences? My response has included both extremes: ignore every one of them and kill each one. Right now, I’m somewhere in the middle. Years ago spell check shocked me by showing all of the passive sentences I used when I wrote. Seemingly every sentence. It was so bad […]
In last week’s post, Check Your Writing, I mentioned the need to watch out for commonly confused words. Spell checkers point out some of the most typical—such as its versus it’s—but I suspect all writers have certain words that trip them up. Knowing what these words are is the first step to avoiding them when […]
I struggle with spelling. I always have and despite some improvement as I write more, I fear I always will. I suspect the root cause of this dilemma is that when I read longer words, I don’t look at all its letters, but merely the first few, along with the overall shape and length of […]