How to write good

As a developmental editor, I am hired to find things that are wrong with what you wrote, and to tell you how to fix them.

I do that. But more important than finding fault is identifying what needs to be preserved. I look for what’s unique about your manuscript. Those distinctive human qualities are always there — assuming, of course, that your manuscript was written by a human.

For example:

• You’re funny.
• You’re a good storyteller, with some fascinating and revealing stories to tell.
• You’ve seem the challenge you’re describing a thousand times, and you know every thing that can go wrong and how to fix it.
• You’re on the leading edge of a new trend and you’ve seen the future.
• You have a vast collection of case study examples that prove your points in unique ways.
• You know and can quote a broad and knowledgeable collection of experts.
• You gathered and analyzed data that’s never been shared before.
• You’re visionary.
• You’ve been completely down and out and have lived to come back and tell us about it.
• You can tell a unique behind-the-scenes narrative that reveals what really happened in a notorious set of events.

This is just what I could come up with in five minutes of brainstorming. There are as many unique and fascinating human qualities in manuscripts as there are writers.

Once I’ve identified those unique qualities, I can figure out how to preserve them as I fix your ideation, structural, narrative, grammatical, and consistency problems (and as I pester you to put footnotes in).

Yup. Even if you wrote something like “How to write good.”

Uniquely you

As your editor, I can preserve your unique voice and ideas — but only if you haven’t erased them with AI.

If you use AI to write your manuscript, you’ve made two fatal errors.

First, you’ve thrown away what makes you unique and embraced the idea that you should sound like everyone else.

And second, you’ve removed the clues that allow me as your editor to preserve your unique ideas and voice. I can’t see your hidden personality, so I can’t make it more visible to the world.

(You’ve also rendered your manuscript uncopyrightable, but that’s fixable. The other problems aren’t.)

Your actual writing is flawed, disorganized, idiosyncratic, and fully human. Embrace that.

Because that I can work with.