Syntax gives us the power to say things that don’t make sense: Ideas can’t have color (or crash a car), and something colorless can’t also be green, but I can say “colorless green ideas crashed my car,” and you can understand me, even if you’re quite not sure what I mean. The structure of a …
Tag Archives: Revision
Colorless Green Ideas Crashed My Car
Creating Your Own Style Guide and Editing List
In this post, I’m passing along some thoughts about tools that work for me and might help some of you too—creating your own style guide and editing list. Style Guide One of the most well-known style guides is the Chicago Manual of Style. You can use the book or the online version to look up …
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The Rules Disease
Writing Rules Anyone who seriously tackles the craft of writing is likely to have encountered a writing rule, like “Show, Don’t Tell,” or “Never Begin a Sentence with a Conjunction.” “Don’t Split Infinitives” and “Never Head Hop” are also popular. The granddaddy of all of them, “Omit Needless Words,” is deliciously self-explanatory … but the …
Learning from Publication
Recently I wrote a short story called “Steampunk Fairy Chick” for the UnCONventional anthology. Even though the story went through many revisions, lots of beta readers, two editors and a copyeditor, when I read through my author’s copy I found there were still things I wanted to change. Nothing major—just line edit stuff, a selection …