You’ve completed a draft and you’d like a review. This is your chance to tell the editor clearly what you need. Or, you could start with excuses. It’s your choice. When you turn over a draft for editing, there’s always stuff that you worry is weak or wrong. Resist the urge to hide your weaknesses. This is…
When you’re planning to write, but before you’re actually writing, you create an outline. Unfortunately, most outlines are worthless. You need a better outline: a fat outline. Outlines are helpful for mapping out the structure of a long piece of writing — anything more than 1,000 words (a couple of pages). An outline ought to help the…
You asked for feedback. You got their edits. Now what? Should you do what they say? When it comes to edits (and, for that matter, advice on anything), the key principles is this: [tweetthis]Editors exist to reveal what you cannot see, not to tell you what to do.[/tweetthis] This is a crucial distinction. If…
In the 1964 bestseller “Games People Play,” Eric Berne showed how transactional analysis (TA) explains emotional conflict. In TA, people interact in one of three roles: parent, adult, or child; when roles get confused, people get upset. These same kinds of conflicts occur, for similar reasons, when writers and editors aren’t clear about the roles they’re playing. Here’s the briefest possible explanation…
Editing is like going to the dentist — nobody likes it, but you’ll avoid a lot of pain and ugliness if you get the right help at the right time. And you need to pick the right intensity of editing to match what your writing needs; you can’t fix a toothache with just a cleaning. Good…
For all my talk about writing, I’ve found that there’s only one way to get better. Practice. Write. Get feedback. Rewrite. Then write something else. Repeat as frequently as possible.
Crappy writing springs from crappy planning. Like an architect, plan before you build. On a project that takes weeks or months to write, spend at least one day on planning. Follow these planning tips to maximize your chance to create something great. In this post, I show you how to lay the groundwork for a writing project like…
All day long we read on our various screens. This has vastly increased the demand for content, which comes to us through many channels. But those who create it have forgotten what good writing is. Think back to the world of 1980. The average consumer or businessperson at that time had no email, and there was no Internet. What…
Content from an established media site is credible, right? Not when it’s contributed content. Media sites need content; people need to promote their ideas — the web makes it easy to connect them. The only thing lost is editorial judgment. Unlike the native advertising I discussed yesterday, contributed articles are unpaid, unlabelled self-promotion. The person placing the…