What Being An Editor Taught Me About Being A Better Writer

[pbray]

My guest blog is up on the Magical Words website click here to read.

It's the early lessons that I keep coming back to. "Don't hit your sister" "Sharing is important, even if it is the last cookie" and "Never get involved in a land war in Asia" are all still important axioms to live by, while the advice "Be neat, be polite and be on time" applies as much to my manuscripts as it does to me.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I try very hard to keep my mss tidy, but I am the typo queen and a handful always get by me. I need better eyes or something.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I've always thought writers should be issued minions.

And a certain amount of typos are inevitable, it's the ones where the pages start to bleed from the corrections (in red ink, naturally) that make me wonder if the author even knows that her computer has a spell check function.

[vespican.livejournal.com]

Of course, one should realize that spell check and grammar check functions are best used as a guide and not an ultimate authority.
Dave

[vespican.livejournal.com]

Since my above comment, I've been doing some work on my first novel. Used spell check and grammar check and found: Grammar check continuously confuses "it's" and "its," amongst other things. Also dislikes repeated words, as in "aye aye, sir." The function is also bad at determining which words are actual subject and verb and suggests changes that make no sense at all. Words that are normally verbs but used as nouns also confuse the heck out of the system.
Dave