Cut Your Babies
By Annette Rey
Many writers want to meet a word count and fear they won’t be able to reach that objective. So they spew. That’s not a totally bad thing. Their problems arise when they find they have over-extended and need to eliminate words for the sake of their word count. Their words are their babies. “But I like the way it sounds now!”
Word count be damned, put concision in position one. You will find that if you focus on concision, clarity follows.
Help For Your Manuscript
By Annette Rey
I said help for your manuscript but, hey, Bloggers, this is for you, too.
I like my written work to look clean, well-thought out, well-planned. I’m a stickler on things both large and small. Are you?
Don’t you hate it when you are typing away and something in the software program is not cooperating with your standards? How do you fix it?
Editing Exercises
By Annette Rey
Participating in writing exercises will help break writer’s block as well as improve your writing. Simple, short challenges work just as well. You wouldn’t waste energy exercising your body and not having a body part target in mind. Nor should you engage in writing exercises without a goal in mind for writing improvement.
The next exercise will help you target editing even before the editing stage.
Stop and Check for Clarity
By Annette Rey
As writers, we can get lost in our own words. We get absorbed in our stories and we concentrate on many aspects of putting our story together. Often, our fingers are moving slower than the speed of our mental thoughts, and mistakes are made.
Let’s put a concentrated eye on unclear sentences that confuse the reader. Once you become aware of these errors, you will be able to correct them.
We Can’t Get Enough of Them
By Annette Rey
ILoveLibraries.org — http://www.ilovelibraries.org/ — Find out how libraries have changed and what they have to offer.
GrammarGirl.com – http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl — by Mignon Fogarty, self-explanatory. Quite a variety of information for writers on this site.
Grammarly.com — https://www.grammarly.com/1 — is a grammar checker program that proofreads, checks for plagiarism, and more. At a price — $29.95 for monthly, or $19.98 a month for quarterly, or $11.66 a month for yearly. Just plug in your material. This may be useful to a writer who does not have an editor, and has his manuscript near to completion. The site also offers a free subscription. Just plug in your work and it will run basic corrections with instructions for you to implement changes or not. I have found this very helpful in guiding me to lessen errors for future articles. So, I use it as a teaching site, as well.
Phobialist.com — http://phobialist.com/ — If you are writing a character into your story that has a mental disorder, you will find it here in an alphabetized list of scientific-phobias.
WellRead.org — http://www.wellread.org/ — an online site that details a public television program by the same name. It provides a wealth of books to investigate, reviews, conversations, and more. You can join the WellRead Book Club for free and participate in live chats with authors, win autographed books, and more. The site also includes BookMarks by Mary Ann Gwinn who reviews multiple books a week.
Eliminating Additional Extras
By Annette Rey
Is your written work heavy with too many words?
As the subtitle suggests, writers unintentionally include unnecessary words in their first draft. During the editing process, your work needs to be made concise without sacrificing your original meaning.
Let’s look at one of the ways we add superfluous words and the remedy for it.
Writer's Block No More 