Listening your writing being read out loud to you is a powerful yet underrated method to improve it enormously. And it's so simple! When you listen to your words, you suddenly hear extra words that that were slipped in (extra "thats" are a speciality of mine), pauses (commas) that are missing, and better ways to … Continue reading How to get Word to read your writing to you
I’m a nature lover, and I try to generate as little waste as possible. (If you haven’t read Zero Waste Home, do it!). I lurk in a zero waste Facebook group in which someone recently shared a link to this academic paper: “Limitations of the waste hierarchy for achieving absolute reductions in material throughput”, published … Continue reading Academic papers: How to clean up your story
As a copy editor, I’m very aware that there’s a particular trick of the brain that happens when we write, and it fascinates me. It is this: the descent of a cloud that makes it impossible to see that your meaning is ambiguous. It happens to everyone. “Let’s eat Grandpa!” What a great start to … Continue reading The black magic of ambiguity in writing
Effective writing flows into the reader’s mind like well-constructed speech. To do so, it needs pauses, emphases and lilt, just like speech does. No rewinding is needed to figure out what was being said; the readers or listeners instantly understand each point as it’s read or spoken, and their concentration moves on to the next … Continue reading How punctuation helps your writing to speak
