Starting Over

Happy Friday, everyone!

In explaining my absence, I also get to talk about something that not many writers or editors want to admit — that sometimes, there is benefit in simply starting over.

Over the course of the past month or so, we’ve been moving house! We weren’t looking to move, particularly since it hadn’t been long since we rounded up the last of our renovations on our old house following a flood, and were at last getting to enjoy them. But, as often happens, an opportunity presented itself that we simply couldn’t pass up, even if it meant that we were back to the days of living out of boxes while we transformed yet another house from top to bottom.

I use the word ‘transform’ deliberately to highlight the attitude we chose to take with such a daunting project. When we think of starting over, it’s incredibly easy to be discouraged and focus solely on the negative — all the reworking, how tired you’ll be, and so on — rather than the positive end result and moreover, the possibilities inherent in being given a blank slate.

For example, our old house was subject to several restrictions when we renovated: size, budget, who was available to do what at which stage, what materials were available, and even small cosmetic things like the hardware and hearth stone colors that were already there that we didn’t want to change. With our new house, however, we didn’t have as many restrictions — we had much more freedom to create the home we wanted.

The same is true of our projects, including our written ones. That document you’ve been working on relentlessly for the past few months, that never seems to turn out how you want it? Perhaps it itself is restricting you. But how do you know that starting over is really what you need to do? Here are some potential reasons:

  1. The presentation of your thoughts is not as clear as it could be. This is often the case of first drafts written without an outline under the ‘just get it onto the page’ method — a perfectly valid method. If on reading through you seem to jump around a lot, with one subject being cut off by another and reappearing three pages later with little to no warning, this may be a sign that a rewrite is in order. Frequently this is easier rather than trying to untangle the original.
  2. The format of the piece isn’t suitable. It may work, but it may not suit. This is more often the case with creative projects — a traditional stanza-ed poem working better as a prose poem, or a novel really wanting to be a script, for instance — but can crop up in others, such as classroom activities being more effective as interactive rather than a lecture.
  3. External restrictions or changes. These are frequently unexpected, such as a client (or instructor) changing a deliverable, or can be simple oversights such as initially misreading instructions and having to correct oneself.
  4. Project loss. Whether a harddrive crash or something more catastrophic, this is the most obvious (and unfortunate!) reason you’d need to restart.
  5. Something incredibly intrinsic to the project is faulty. Usually, this presents itself as a single component that influences the entire project, and to try to force it to work is either too difficult, would take too much time, or will negatively impact other aspects of the project. For example, no evidence to back up one’s thesis proposal, or a plot hole in a work of fiction.
  6. The overall idea itself simply isn’t working. This is of course one of the hardest and most frustrating reasons to accept, because it often feels like a personal attack. However, it can be the most freeing. Unshackling yourself from a limp idea opens you to far stronger ones.

Even if you’re not encountering problems, experimenting with rewrites — particularly with smaller projects — can not only be useful practice, but can yield unexpectedly good results. A great exercise I remember from college was to write an initial piece, and then cover it and attempt to rewrite it purely from memory. The ideas or images that stuck were clearly the strongest ones, and thus could inform a strong third draft.

Remember, no matter the reason one is faced with a restart, being open to as transformative an opportunity as starting over should be looked on with enthusiasm. You may be surprised by how much you like the new end result compared to the original!

What are some of the reasons you’ve had to restart a project? Did you embrace it, or was it a struggle? What was the end result compared to the original?

 

~ Taegan

With Love

Happy Friday, everyone!

Today’s post is a little later than normal. Why? I seized a rare opportunity to have my young nieces over. They’re at the age where they’re starting to learn about the adult world and question why the grown-ups do the things they do, so it was hardly surprisingly when — while we were walking the dog, no less — I was asked the question all new freelancers cringe at, and writers in particular: “So what do you do all day?”

My initial answer was simple and honest: “I do what I love.”

What I didn’t tell them was that it’d been a busy week. A stressful week. Still is — every so often while we were painting on the patio I guiltily caught myself thinking of all the things I could be ticking off my list instead. Of course I’m grateful, but there are times when the ‘feast’ portion of the ‘feast or famine’ lifestyle can feel overwhelming. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that you love what you do because you’re caught up in minutiae or deadlines — it’s hard to remember why you took the leap in the first place.

With Valentine’s Day just gone and my ‘Month of Love’ underway, I thought it apt to take some time to reflect on why we pursue our passions — and how to keep them going when times are tough.

Without getting too philosophical, pursuing one’s passions of course boils down to the ever-elusive pursuit of joy. We all want to spend our time doing what we love and avoiding what we dislike. This might present itself as just making a hobby into a full-time business, or it might be more about enjoying the challenge rather than about making money. It may be a religious calling or psychological need. For me, it was a combination of honoring my nine-year-old self who decided she was going to be a writer, finding fulfillment in making use of my education and talents, and the immense satisfaction I get from not only making my own schedule and being my own boss (and thus, exiting the ‘rat race’ that caused me so much stress and existential discomfort), but also helping others to boot.

However, human as we are, we are not inexhaustible. Sometimes the well runs dry or you get lost in the woods. ‘You cannot pour from an empty cup’, as the saying goes. So how do you replenish yourself?

  1. Don’t be afraid to take a step back. Put it away. Turn off your monitor. Go do something different for five minutes, an hour, a weekend, a month. Coming back to it with fresh eyes can be like meeting an old friend, and you’ve regained your energy for it in the process. Take a retreat, go get some sunshine, take a nap.
  2. Talk to someone else about it. Often when we’re explaining what we do to other people, it causes us to remember aspects of our job or passion that we’d forgotten because it’d been a while since we’ve done/encountered that aspect. Not to mention that when someone shows interest in what we do, that’s an ego boost!
  3. Do something related that has less rules and pressure. Writing a thesis with strict formatting and references? Make a casual blog post about your current sub-topic. Proofreading a novel? Try a wordsearch instead. It’s like stretching.
  4. Similar to the above, shift gears and focus on a different but related aspect of your passion. For example, when I don’t have the inspiration to write I’m browsing Pinterest for character or setting ideas or watching a movie set in a similar era.
  5. Write down or otherwise share and diffuse your worries or frustrations. Bottling it up can not only make you feel like you’re the only one who has ever or will ever experience your stress or disillusionment, but actually begin to undermine your work. Try journaling or venting to a friend or engaging in a social network for others in your field. Ask for help.
  6. Remember why you started.

I’m glad I painted and played hide and seek with my nieces today instead of whittling down my list further. Watching them make art with no inhibitions or doubt, only joy, reminded me to continue to seek out and recognize my own. I was reminded of a fantastic quote by the late, great Ursula K Le Guin:

“The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”

What are your favorite ways to recharge? I’d love to hear about them!

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

New Year’s Resolutions You Can Keep

Happy Friday, everyone, and welcome to 2018!

You haven’t heard from me in a while, I know. If like me you’ve been buried under the holiday season ever since the run-up to Thanksgiving, you can empathize with me as I welcome the crisp cold weather and beautiful blue skies that pronounce our new beginning — and let’s be honest, do you know anyone who had a good 2017?

I’ve never been one for making resolutions. Although they work for a lot of people and I encourage that, for me personally they’ve always set me up for failure. Perhaps I’ve just set too high of expectations for myself. Consequently, the past few years I’ve endeavored to take smaller steps in the right direction, and to that end have subscribed what I feel is a much more feasible motto — start as you mean to go on, and end. No grand gestures that I then beat myself up for not achieving, no massive exhausting overhauls, no cold-turkeys that last for maybe a fortnight tops.

Regardless of whether you’re an all-or-nothing or little-by-little type, small changes that you start now can make a world of difference. One easy resolution is to polish your daily communications. Think of it as ironing your shirt, or investing in new business cards.

Firstly, though, what should be your target? Look at things that enter the public eye, like:

  • Your business cards, speaking of.
  • Your emails, including signatures and out-of-office messages.
  • If you run a blog or online store, check their pages / posts / item descriptions, and things like your invoices.
  • Social media posts, and pages if you have them.
  • Your resume.
  • Forum posts, product reviews, etc., if this is something you regularly do.

Got some ideas? Good. Now here’s the little fixes and good habits you can work on:

  1. Spelling errors. No one’s perfect, but try your best. So many programs and sites nowadays have at least a crude built-in spellchecker — use it! If you’re not sure, copy-and-pasting your text into Word or even Google will quickly find them for you. Always do a read-through before you send/post/submit.
  2. Misuse of the apostrophe. Part of my 2018 post plan is a detailed series on punctuation, but for now, here’s a rule of thumb: apostrophes show ownership, and are used when there’s a letter missing (in other words, to make two words into one, AKA a contraction). Example 1: If you want to make DVD plural, you’ll want to write DVDs rather than DVD’s — at first glance that last one tells me that the DVDs are owning something. Example 2: if you want a shorter version of they are or David is, you’ll want to write they’re or David’s.
  3. Following from the above, the difference between contractions, possessive pronouns, and in some cases directionals — your/you’re, there/their/they’re, etc. Practice with the apostrophe will help with these. Make sure you mean that place (there — a directional) versus they are (they’re — a contraction) versus belonging to them (their — a possessive pronoun).
  4. Misuse of capitalization. Capitals are mainly for the first word of a sentence, names and titles, and acronyms (e.g. — CD or OMV). Only rarely are they used for emphasis — and only as ‘all-caps’ rather than simply Capitalizing Every Word or random Words — and quickly lose their impact if used too much. Haphazard incorrect use tends to look sloppy.
  5. Excessive exclamation marks. One is enough where it is needed — an entire string does not make your point any stronger. In fact, it looks amateurish. And while we’re at it, consider whether you need one at all and if your point isn’t powerful enough using just a period. Every time I’m tempted to use one I tend to ask myself whether I want it for volume or to express emotion (in both cases, shouldn’t my words themselves make it clear?), or to emphasize that last word (in which case, try italics or bold).
  6. Lack of punctuation altogether. The linguistic evolution of lack of punctuation on the Internet as a means in of itself to suggest tone or as a form of humor is a conversation for another day. There’s also a time and a place for that and work emails isn’t one of them. Leaving off that period or question mark suggests hurriedness, laziness, or that you simply don’t respect the recipient enough to give them good communication, none of which are good.

To nurture these little habits, the first thing you have to do is get accustomed to slowing down and looking for them. Recognizing them is half the battle. The more often you correct them, the more practice your brain will get in writing them correctly the first time. Better yet, if you extend this practice to writing that does not necessarily enter the public eye — your personal journal, greeting cards, storage labels — the stronger the good habits will grow.

Naturally, old habits are hard to break, and of course correctly using the apostrophe won’t get you that dream job — but it’ll certainly stop an eyebrow being raised. Polishing these little tell-tale signs of clumsy writing not only means that your reader’s eye is distraction-free, but that the impression you’re making is far more professional and confident. And who doesn’t want that?

What are your writing New Year’s resolutions? What are some of your communication pet-peeves, or bad habits you can’t quite seem to shake?

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

Pros and Cons of Using Local Vernacular

Happy Friday, everyone!

I may have mentioned that I was born and currently live in the Southern US; I may also have mentioned that I had a twelve-year stint in the UK. While naturally I haven’t encountered all the dialects either of them have to offer, I’ve seen and heard a good share. Local vernacular is close to my heart right now, too, because of the novel I’m working on that’s set in New Orleans in 1916, which is why I wanted to take today to talk about the talk, a.k.a. local vernacular.

What do I mean, exactly, by local vernacular? It’s slang, essentially. An ingredient of local or regional dialects. What can readily link a person to a geographical area in addition to (but not the same as) an accent. Why should it matter to you? Because yes, there are some occasions where it’s good to be linked to a region, but there are other times that you’ll want to avoid it.

Local vernacular in writing is ultimately a tool, and the better you understand how and when to use it, the better. We see it all the time in marketing (whether we realize it or not) where it’s used to inspire loyalty from a certain customer base, make a product or service recognizable, or support/create an image of belonging. If you’re one of the crowd, you’re trusted as a businessperson. For example, pseudo-French signage and packaging is understandably rampant here in Louisiana because of the pride in French and Creole heritage – if your product or service utilizes it, not only are you understood, but you are seen as belonging and friendly. Meanwhile, we also see local vernacular in fiction to enrich characters and impart flavor and realism to the setting. There’s a little more flexibility in fiction since we can set and play with our own rules. If you get the details right, you’re trusted as an author.

So if local vernacular is pervasive and useful, why would we want to avoid it? There are three main reasons:

  1. Geographical limitations. You can only take a piece of slang so far before, frankly, it may not be understood. For instance, the South will have a ready grasp of lagniappe — ‘a little something extra’, for those of you not from around here — because it’s familiar. Head north, east, or west, however, and while they may have heard it before, they may struggle to define it. Head outside of the US and use it, and you may not be understood at all. If something’s not understood, it’s ineffective. If you’re trying to market yourself, a service, or a product outside of the locality that uses that language, you’re going to struggle — it’s incredibly rare for a business with a name or slogan that uses local vernacular to be successful in a larger national or international market.
  2. It’s ultimately slang, whether you like it or not. Slang falls into the informal language category and as you know, there are occasions where informal language is appropriate and where it is not. It’s unfortunate but true that outsiders to a dialect, upon hearing/reading it, will — because of point #1 — feel at a disadvantage, which usually translates to seeing that dialect as lesser. Not all the time, but often. A more common example is that we all know that we shouldn’t be casual in an interview, and speak formally and clearly.
  3. Consistency problems, which mostly applies to writing. While there may be a few words that have a widely-understood spelling, when you get into the less obvious representations of dialect (e.g. — using apostrophes everywhere to contract words or drop a final letter) the fact of the matter is that it can be difficult to keep track of how you write something and when. I know I do. Also, though punctuation is a beautiful thing, if you have apostrophes everywhere eventually your manuscript is going to look like a spider skittered through an ink pad and then over every page.

Readability is key: too much vernacular and your reader will be exhausted by the time they get through a couple of paragraphs. You want your text — whether it’s a resume, a novel, or a business card — to be easy for your reader to understand, and appropriate to the audience and your intentions.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with local vernacular, be it when writing or reading!

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

How to Manage Your Drafts

Happy Friday, everyone!

Receiving suggestions and mark-ups from editors and friends is one of the most highly-anticipated – if not exciting – things about the entire editorial process, as a writer. It also stands to reason that eventually, no matter what kind of documents you work with, your harddrive or filing cabinet is going to fill up with bushels of drafts. Which is great, because you want to keep old drafts – what if you lose a current one? What if you change your mind and want to go back to the approach you took last month on that chapter? Trust me, it’s better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

But even for the most organized among us, keeping track of which is what – and thus avoiding redundant work – can prove tricky. Here’s some tips!

  1. Filing system? What filing system? – If this is you, this is the first thing you need to tackle. Regardless of whether your documents are digital or physical, where you keep them is of utmost importance. For one thing, all the time you normally spend looking for something can be better-spent working on that something. Separate things into categories – don’t put your vacation photos in the same box as your resume, or those documents you need for your job in the same one as that novel you’re working on. From there, organization can be done in a number of ways depending on the category you’re working with. For example, photos or tax documents are be best organized by date, while files belonging to different clients may be best-placed in files with the client’s name. Under the main file heading of one of my novels, I have sub-files for notes and old drafts while the current work-in-progress draft stands alone. The crucial part is that folder and file names are recognizable to you.
  2. Speaking of names, keep them concise and informative. If you’re working with a series of files all related to one another, decide on a naming convention and stick to it. For example, when I’m editing a series of instructor handouts that are all science labs for a particular module, I’ll use something like: ‘Course Abbreviation, Unit Number, Module: Individual Topic’. And please don’t stick with the automatic first-line file name Word auto-populates for you when you save a file for the first time. If you have a version that’s geared more toward your field of IT, compared to your other version that’s geared more toward teaching, you may want to name them ‘Resume – IT’ and ‘Resume – Teaching’ to distinguish between the two and avoid an embarrassing mix-up. Same goes for different drafts of the same document.
  3. When saving a file, determine the difference between significant and minor changes (and thereby whether you need just the ‘Save’ button or the ‘Save As’ button). This will help you keep file numbers to a minimum. If you’re merely correcting a typo or two, that’s minor – you want to keep that change in subsequent versions of that document. If you get rid of an entire character from a scene, or abridge an article for magazine publication, that’s major. A good rule of thumb is to save something separately (and name accordingly) if you’re not sure about the changes, or otherwise don’t want them to be permanent. I also advise doing this with cosmetic changes (such as font) with professional documents, and documents that aren’t your own – it’s always a good idea to keep a copy of the unchanged original.

Oops! I have five documents that all pretty much have the same name! How can I tell the difference and which do I keep?

Fear not. There’s a couple of tricks you can use, and they involve letting Microsoft’s file viewer do the work. First of all, the file viewer enables you to sort files according to ‘Date modified’ – the one with the most recent date is, naturally, the one you worked on last. It’ll also display the file size – the larger the file size, the longer the contents in all likelihood. Rename as soon as you determine the difference – remember you’ll need to exit the file then rename it in the folder itself, rather than doing a ‘Save As’. If it helps you to put ‘last edited’ dates or ‘Longer Version’ in the file name, go for it! Also note that Word has the handy little feature of document auto-recovery if you forget to save and your computer shuts down (though it is by no means a replacement for diligence).

If you typically work in auto-save programs such as GoogleDocs, you may run into a problem with keeping old versions. You’ll either need to physically copy the entire document into a new one in order to have it then auto-save itself as a new version, or you can switch the ‘Editing’ mode to ‘Suggesting’ mode on yourself, so that changes aren’t made permanent until you tell them to be. If you prefer, you can use this tactic in Word with its ‘Track Changes’ feature in addition to saving separately. I’ll be talking about in-document change-tracking in more detail another time.

Remember that keeping yourself organized is key to keeping professional. I’d love to hear some of the techniques you’ve found that work for you! Questions, too, are always welcome.

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

Ten Ways to Build Writing Confidence

Happy Friday, everyone!

In previous posts, you may remember me mentioning the importance of creation before you can even begin to contemplate editing. Sounds obvious, right? Maybe even easy? A second glance, however – or a second sit-down at the desk to stare at a blank page – reveals that often, it’s the exact opposite. In today’s post I want to take a little detour from our usual fare of editing and the like to talk about writing.

First, let’s get a misconception out of the way – there’s no ‘magic cure’. There will be days where the words just don’t flow, and everyone has them. There’s no hard science that will instantly make everyone prolific. Much of it boils down to practice, experience, and discipline. Yet there are some factors that you can influence in order to make practicing – and thus discipline – come more easily, and lead to experience. Many of these will overlap with those I’ve mentioned in ‘When Editing Is Bad’.

  1. Give your writing – and yourself – due respect. Recognize that this effort is just as important as any other pursuit. Often we become inhibited by thoughts such as “I’m not good at this, so why should I bother?” or “But this has already been talked about.”. They’re often grounded in falsehood and sabotage you before you even begin. Own what you’re doing.
  2. Following on from the above, build an environment that will best cultivate this fledgling habit. This could include setting aside a particular time/day, setting deadlines or goals if they help you or removing them if they don’t, finding a dedicated space in which the writing happens, noise levels, and so on. You may find that this is a work-in-progress in of itself, or that it varies depending on what you’re working on.
  3. Find a support network. There are an unbelievable amount of writers out there and just as many readers, but instead of finding this daunting, know that there are a nearly equal number of groups where you can share your writing and get feedback and encouragement. Likewise, enlist the help of friends and family for additional encouragement (I promise you, I get more encouraging remarks than sneers when I say I’m a writer). No one does this alone, and feedback will be crucial to your improvement.
  4. Find a method that works best for you. You could be a plan-it-out-to-the-last-detail writer, with oodles of notes and bullet-pointed frameworks, or you could be a “I’m going to start in the middle and see what happens” sort. You could prefer writing by hand or by typing or by dictating and transcribing. Everyone works differently and no method is better than another.
  5. Gather what external resources you need for the particular work. If you need to write webcopy for a client, make sure you know what they want; if you’re contracted to write an article on growing tomatoes, read up on tomato-growing; if you’re writing a historical novel set in Jamaica in the 1800s, do your research; if you’re experimenting with ghazals as a poetic form, study lots of ghazals; if you’re writing the next best sci-fi novel, watch a bunch of sci-fi movies or spend an hour or two on Pinterest to get inspired.
  6. Practice. Scribble thoughts in a notebook or on post-its as you go about your day. Keep GoogleDocs open. Write down all your thoughts at the end of the day. Journal. Whatever works best for you. The idea is that the more accustomed you grow to physically articulating your thoughts and seeing them there on the page, the more normal the action will become for you.
  7. Read widely. The truth of the matter is that, if nothing else, reading widely will show you what’s possible.
  8. Try not to pigeonhole yourself – or be too strict – in the beginning. Started a romance novel that ended up wanting to be a mystery? Got halfway through your essay and ended up changing your own viewpoint? What was supposed to be mere tangential evidence in your thesis becomes the thing you’re actually interested in? It happens! The important bit is that you wrote.
  9. Try not to get too caught up in making it perfect the first go round. Editing can come later. Just get it out for now.
  10. You cannot make everyone happy. There are going to be people who love your work, and others who can’t stand it. Building up a thick skin is part of being a writer. The most important thing is, as Philip Pullman says, to write to please yourself. Write the novel, or poem, or critical article, or biography – whatever it may be – for you.

I know not everyone is aiming to make writing into a fullblown career. Some folks just want to be more confident when it comes time to write up that quarterly report for the boss, or feel pretty good about their college entrance essay. All of these are valid reasons to improve one’s writing skills – humans are social creatures that, introvert or extrovert though we may be, need communication in order to feel fulfilled. Writing is just one of those ways, and it opens so many doors.

In a year, you’d wish you’d started today.

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

When Editing is Bad

Happy Friday, everyone!

As all you poets are no doubt aware, tomorrow begins 2017’s Poem-a-Day April! As it says on the box, the goal is to write a poem a day for the entirety of April, which  – even as a poet who’s semi-successfully managed it a couple of times – I have to admit is pretty daunting. Not only am I writing this in solidarity and as a salute, but also as a chance to point out when editing can sometimes be a hindrance.

If you’re not a perfectionist, in a way I envy you. The fact of the matter is that sometimes – no matter what you’re writing – you can become preoccupied with making your first draft perfect on the first try. This can lead to a lot of false starts, over-writing, a sudden block partway through, or worse – never starting. If this happens enough it can even have longer-lasting effects on your overall confidence. All of these are killer if you have deadlines of any kind.

So say it with me: “It’s okay if it’s not perfect on the first try. Or the second, or the third, or…”

Say this, too: “What matters is that there’s something on the page. I can work with that ‘something’. I can’t work with ‘nothing’.”

Always keep those two things in mind, because I promise, you will get stuck otherwise. It happens to folks who have just started writing, and to folks who have been writing professionally their whole lives. You will get stuck on worrying whether you’ve got the right word, that you’ll forget all the others you were going to write after it. You’ll take a break to figure out the right metaphor or a good name, and you’ll get distracted for the next two days. You’ll pause to fact-check and end up down the rabbit-hole of the Internet.

Here are a few tactics to help you curb the tendency to become distracted by editing:

  1. Know there’s something you’re going to have to go back and change or check? Put in a placeholder or highlight it. One method I’ve heard of is the ‘ELEPHANT’ method, where if you can’t think of a word right then and there, just type ‘ELEPHANT’ and keep going – when you’re done drafting, you can search for all instances of ‘ELEPHANT’ and replace them when your mind is clearer. This helps you keep your flow.
  2. Set realistic deadlines if they help you, or remove them if they don’t. If you do choose to have deadlines, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t meet them. For example, you can start with something small like ‘write a poem before you have your second cup of coffee’ – it’s a deadline with a built-in reward. The idea is that when your brain grows accustomed to achieving small goals, it’s in a better position to achieve slightly larger goals, and so on.
  3. A friend of mine hand-writes her work and covers her prior lines with a sheet of paper to stop herself looking back and thus getting distracted by editing. You can feasibly do this with window-resizing on a computer, too.
  4. Devote specific times to writing, and specific times to editing, e.g. – ‘during the week I’ll write, but Saturdays I’ll edit’, or ‘I’m not going to look at these poems again until May, when Poem-a-Day April is over’. Knowing you’ve allotted time in advance can help put your mind at ease, as it’s no longer worried about missing the opportunity and feels bolstered by your organization skills.
  5. Remind yourself that beyond a simple spelling/grammar check, you can always leave the editing to – guess who! – your editor. That’s why this tag-team exists in the first place! Knowing someone else has your back can be instrumental to your process.

Although editing is still part of the creative process – and some would argue that it’s the most rewarding part – they are different modes of thinking and sometimes jostle for elbow room, to the detriment of each other. The fact remains that you cannot edit what isn’t there, therefore you should prioritize creation in the initial stages.

What are some of the hurdles you’ve encountered? Any other tactics for overcoming them that you’ve found useful?

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

P.S. – Good luck, poets! I’ll be writing alongside you this season.

How to Become a More Concise Writer

Happy Friday, everyone!

I’m privileged to work with many different types of writing these days – I’ll be working on a novel one day, a thesis the next, then a poem, then vocational curriculum.  The list goes on. One of the things they all have in common, though, is often a need for brevity.

You’ve got your audience’s attention – great! But you have to keep that attention. There’s debate over the average attention span and whether it’s shortening due to the rise of digital technology, but the point remains that you only have so much time to get your message across, even if your reader has settled down and is in for the long haul to listen to whatever you have to tell them. Brevity is still a virtue and it is one of the main areas a good editor will look for.

Here’s some easy ways for you to check the concision of your writing yourself!

  1.  Read it aloud. Yes, you may feel silly at first, but reading your writing aloud will not only help identify awkward phrasing, but you’re more likely to notice when you’re being too wordy or have a ‘pet word’.
  2. When rereading your work, ask yourself as often as possible whether there’s a shorter way to say what you mean, or whether this sentence actually presents any new information. Be ruthless.
  3. Punctuation, conjunctions, and transitions not only help the flow of your writing, but allow you more flexibility in communicating your ideas. For example, instead of needing two fully-fleshed-out sentences a simple comma and conjunction tag-team may eliminate the need for five or six words or repeats of important terms.
  4. For some, character/word/page/time limits help. Those of you familiar with the ‘elevator pitch’ know this. If you impose a limit on yourself, your brain is likely to rise to the challenge and pare down what you want to say in order to fit that limit. It helps you determine what’s really important for the reader to know.
  5. Consider your audience and what they will actually want to hear. One of my pet peeves, for example, is a blog post containing a recipe I’m interested in, but which also contains two pages of context about the weather that day. While some may find this charming, I just want the recipe.
  6. Make a bullet-pointed list of your talking points. I use this strategy with non-fiction often, and you can use it before you write (e.g. – planning an essay) or when you’re editing and possibly rewriting. A similar tactic is after writing something once, cover it up and try to rewrite from memory – the stronger phrasings and main points will stick in your mind and you’ll be able to weed out the weaker.
  7. Avoid too many irrelevant anecdotes, ‘weasel words‘, unnecessary qualifiers (‘very tired’ versus ‘exhausted’), and the passive voice wherever possible.

Now, you may be thinking, “But Taegan, I’m writing a novel / thesis / non-fiction book about X; my reader wants to know as much as I can tell them on my subject.”

Yes, absolutely. Longer works do tend to be more lenient in the brevity department. However, here’s my rule of thumb: every word on that page needs to earn its keep, otherwise it is taking up valuable space where I could be talking about something new. It’s a similar concept to the Chinese proverb of ‘If the first words fail, ten thousand will then not avail’, in that if you let yourself ramble, your message weakens. Always choose quality over quantity.

Brevity will benefit: your pacing, the organization of your ideas, your meaning, the strength of your writing, and ultimately your readers.

Remember to use this advice in moderation, since you don’t want to obscure your meaning by cutting too much. For this reason, I often recommend writing all your thoughts out first and cutting back afterward.

Finally, also remember that this advice applies to all types of writing, from fiction to job postings to resumes to research articles to…

I’ll stop. Good luck, and remember you can always ask me if you have questions!

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

Apples to Oranges – a Glossary

Happy Friday, everyone!

Like with any profession, you soon discover that there’s more to it than meets the eye. Editing is no different. As you grow more familiar with using an editor you will likely notice that not all editing is the same – nor is it charged at the same rate. To help you come to grips with the types of editing that are out there and which will best suit your needs, read on!

The following are listed in approximate order of the editor’s level of involvement with re-writing the text in any way, from the shallow end to the deep end. It’s not all the types that are out there, but the most common. Note that sometimes these definitions will vary depending on who you talk to and the level of expertise required by the text, and sometimes the terms may be used interchangeably. Additionally, each type of editing has optimum points at which it should occur in the process. Always remember to ask your editor what you’re getting.

Manuscript evaluation – while not an editorial service, strictly-speaking, it’s worth mentioning because you may encounter it and it may be all you need. A manuscript evaluator will provide a read-through of your text and then provide you with an in-depth critique (what’s working and what isn’t, and how it can be improved); they do not, however, go into depth or make marks on your text. Those spelling errors will stay where they are.

Proofreading – the most basic of editorial services, and probably the one you’ve heard in everyday use. Many folks think that this goes into more depth than it actually does. Proofreading will check your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and other little things like format and any style issues (did you use a different font size accidentally, for example). Sometimes a proofreader will also do small edits for clarity or concision, but nothing beyond that.

Copyediting – the most commonly-used phrase to describe editing of any nature, and as such please be cautious. Some folks use it to describe what is actually proofreading or what is actually developmental editing, but the reality is that it’s somewhere in between. You’ll get a good proofread, but a copyeditor will also look at overall manuscript flow, consistency, and other broader issues. They may also do some fact-checking, though you should probably look for an editor who specializes in this aspect.

Line-editing – it’s common see this term used interchangeably with developmental editing. However, it can also denote a creative copyeditor, in the sense that while a copyeditor will look for technical errors, a line-editor will look for creative flaws or weaknesses such as pacing, strength of imagery, or voice-appropriateness. As you may have guessed, they go line-by-line (which isn’t to say that other types of editors do not). You’ll often see line-editing in conjunction with fiction.

Developmental Editing – as the name suggests, very in-depth editing. Developmental editors may work with a text that’s already finished, but it’s more common to find that they are there from the start of the text and help the writer see it through to fruition. They specialize in significant textual overhauls – structure shifts, reorganization of ideas, and other in-depth editing that takes place alongside codyediting/proofreading (though a second editor may be involved afterward to do this). However, if the developmental editor has to do any significant amount of writing they then tread into the territory of ghostwriting. You’ll often see developmental editing in conjunction with non-fiction, particularly academia.

Notice that the majority of these involve the editor working with texts that have already been created. Generally-speaking, if you’re looking for someone to help you create the text initially or completely rewrite it for you for one reason or another, the terms you’re going to encounter will likely have the word ‘writing’ or ‘writer’ in there somewhere. That’s a discussion for another day.

Once you know what you want, it’s easier to find it and ask for it. I hope this helps! Remember, you can always ask me if you’re uncertain.

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

 

Five Habits That Make Your Writing Look Unprofessional

Happy Friday, everyone!

I was talking to a friend yesterday about our writing habits – which of them are beneficial and which are not. While our discussion mainly revolved around our overall writing process, it made me think about the smaller habits I see in clients whose work I’m familiar with, and my own. Old habits die hard, goes the adage – and why? Because so often we don’t realize they’re there and though our well-intentioned friend the auto-checker tries its best, it frequently doesn’t catch them.

You’d be forgiven, after scanning the list below with bated breath, to not see a problem with many of them – what you may not realize is that these habits make your work sound dated, look unprofessional, and feel clunky, which are the absolute last things you want! Often it is the littlest of things that makes a reader question the authority of the writer, and even stop reading altogether. The more you can avoid these tell-tale signs of an unpracticed writer, the better.

  1. Capitalizing keywords unironically. (Not to be confused with typing in all caps.) Capital letters should only be used in specific instances – titles, proper nouns, and the beginning of sentences being the three main areas. No doubt you’ve seen them used as a stylistic choice, such as to make a webpage appear uniform (look at any of the button labels on most websites you regularly use) or as a tongue-in-cheek way to pretend something is more serious than it actually is (see if you can spot it in this post of mine). You’ll also see legal documents capitalizing important terms. However, too often I see the old habit of using them for emphasis in everyday writing, as though this technique were interchangeable with italics or bolding. It’s not. Don’t do it, folks – not only is it old-fashioned, untidy, and incorrect, but it smacks of poor marketing and is a sure-fire way to make your reader wonder if you’re trying to sell them something.
  2. A double space after every sentence. This is another common one. Instead of hitting that space bar once at the end of the sentence and starting another, it’s hit twice. While not incorrect, strictly-speaking, it can get distracting and is a clear indicator of the generation in which you learned to type (or the age of the person who taught you). Why? The practice of using the double-space after the end of a sentence began as a typesetter’s bad habit back in the advent of the printing press, which was originally straightened-out once conventions were developed during its rise to power. However, the reason you yourself may be guilty of this habit is whether you were introduced to typing via someone who regularly used a typewriter, wherein they may have found difficulty determining where a sentence ended due to the machine’s limitations; a double-space was used so that you could more easily tell that sentence was over. Thanks to modern computing, we don’t generally have that problem. Get rid of that second space.
  3. Bunny-ears. You may see them written “doubly“ or ‘singly‘, and you may know them by a less endearing name, but they’re there. Of course, there’s a time and a place for using quotation or speech marks – the problem arises when you use them too liberally and when it’s not really necessary. When that happens, when I’m reading all I can hear is an older person trying to be cool with the kids. On a more practical note, though, consider this: speech or quote marks are often used in this context to show that you’re quoting someone else, or that the sentiment or thought contained therein isn’t really yours. It’s a distancing tactic. Fine – sometimes it’s appropriate to do that. But when every other thought that you’re expressing carries this sign of uncertainty, I begin to doubt your confidence in what you’re saying. Not to mention it’s going to get confusing when you’re actually quoting someone or writing dialogue.
  4. Dated phrasings, particularly references to technological advancement that’s already happened. As an example, take one of my pet peeves: ‘In today’s world’. If you’re about to write about something that’s occurring now, just write it without introduction. We automatically assume it’s happening in the present without you needing to tell us. If you do, it makes you sound like you’re preaching from decades back. This is of course slightly different from archaisms – words and phrases that we don’t use anymore, such as ‘pray tell’ for ‘what is it?’.  If you’re uncertain whether you’re using a dated phrase, ask yourself if the sentence will still make sense without it, or if it’s stating the obvious. This involves understanding your intended audience.
  5. Multiple exclamation points, question marks, or over-use of ellipses. Conversely, this can also denote an immature writer. There is no reason to use more than one exclamation point or question mark. No excuses. Adding more will not make it more. Most of us rarely stray into that habit – more often I see the incorrect or over-use of the ellipsis (‘…’). More than a comma or dash, an ellipsis is used to slow the reader down. You may remember being introduced to it in school as a technique to create suspense. The problem lies…when you use it…too much… Then I don’t know…what you’re trying to lead me into thinking, or even…what you mean…sometimes…or even if you know… (You see what I mean?) It’s melodramatic, cluttering, and like too many bunny-ears leads me to think you’re not confident enough in what you’re saying.

Not sure about usage? Spotting these in your own work not your strong suit? That’s what your editor is for! Additionally, as you’ve noticed a lot of these have to do with punctuation; I’m aiming to explore each of the punctuation marks in their own ‘spotlight’ posts to help you get a better grip on them. Stay tuned.

What are some bad habits you can’t seem to shake? What are some of your pet writing or typing peeves?

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan