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The Skilsaw of Skilful Editing™

December 24, 2018 by Donna Freedman Leave a Comment

Editing is an art form. One of the best editors I ever had really knew how to set limits. When he asked for 25 inches on a given topic, that’s what we were expected to deliver.

Those limits made us focus intensely, winnowing out extraneous details. Instead of meandering, indistinct articles, we turned in pieces that told readers what they needed to know.

This being the features section, we were allowed to do it with a bit of panache. “Voice” was a thing* in our department. Unfortunately, we were sometimes a little too in love with the sounds of our voices.

Invariably, the editor called us out when we turned in 30 inches, or 35. Boy, we hated that.

 

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Filed Under: General Tagged With: best practices, freelancing, self-editing, writing

Major proofreading fail.

May 14, 2018 by Donna Freedman Leave a Comment

A while back I offered to proofread a book by a former co-worker. It was for a regional publisher that has its own in-house copyeditor for proofreading, but my friend wanted to go the extra mile.

In fact, he hired yet another former co-worker – who’d spent many years on a newspaper’s copy desk – for a third set of eyes.

A total of five pairs of peepers (including those of the author and the publisher) pored over that manuscript. After finding a handful of typos and misspells, we congratulated ourselves on making the book as clean as it could be.

You can guess what happened in the finished product.

 

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Filed Under: General Tagged With: best practices, humor, self-editing, writing tips

A free peek at “The Complete Writer.”

April 16, 2018 by Donna Freedman 1 Comment

If you’re a freelance writer, a homeschooling parent or even just a word nerd, listen up: Week by week, Dr. Victoria Hay has been making chapters of her upcoming book available for free.

“The Complete Writer: The Ultimate Guide to Writing, Publishing and Living the Writer’s Life” is based on Hay’s considerable knowledge of the written word. For decades she has been making a living as a writer and editor, and also taught writing at Arizona State University.

Every Friday she posts a new work-in-progress chapter on her writing blog, Plain & Simple Press (“Independent fiction and nonfiction”). Currently she’s up to Chapter 9.

Here’s some of what you’ll be getting:

 

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Filed Under: General Tagged With: best practices, books, freelancing, self-editing, writing

Try editing on paper.

April 15, 2017 by Donna Freedman Leave a Comment

Three different sets of eyes went over the manuscript for “Your Playbook For Tough Times: Living Large On Small Change, For The Short Term Or The Long Haul.” My daughter, who’s also a writer, read it. I edited it as I wrote it, and read the rough draft from beginning to end more than once.

Finally, a former newspaper colleague gave it a careful going-over, to the point of testing each URL to make sure it worked. (Fun fact: Some of them didn’t, no matter how careful I thought I’d been.)

So guess what I found when I read the finished book?

 

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Filed Under: General Tagged With: 60-second writing tips, best practices, books, self-editing, writing

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