Readers don’t want filler.
“Vigorous writing is concise,” says William Strunk Jr. in his classic book The Elements of Style. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that … Continue reading
Don’t clog your lines with double attribution.
The author didn’t realize she was wasting words whenever her characters spoke.
In nearly every instance, she provided not only a dialogue tag, “Christina said,” but also a “beat” or “action tag,” a phrase describing what the character did as she spoke.
Consider this double attribution line:
“I’m so sorry,” Christina said, … Continue reading
You’ll see a lot.
I was proud of the layout I’d just completed. Getting the brief text and the multiple photos to fit took several tries, but finally the elements came together.
Satisfied, I sent the pages to my first reader.
A few hours later, he pointed out a typo, which I marked to fix the next morning.
But the next morning, I reviewed the … Continue reading