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    All About Copyediting: 55 Easy Edits to Improve Your Writing Skills Forever
    All About Copyediting: 55 Easy Edits to Improve Your Writing Skills Forever
    All About Copyediting: 55 Easy Edits to Improve Your Writing Skills Forever
    Ebook190 pages1 hour

    All About Copyediting: 55 Easy Edits to Improve Your Writing Skills Forever

    By K.J. Heritage

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    About this ebook

    Want to add punch to your prose? Follow these 55 simple edits and improve your writing forever!

    Getting readers past page one, despite your ‘explosive, fast paced hitting-the-ground-running opening’, is what this guide is all about.

    Applying the 55 easy editing steps to your fiction will allow reviewers and readers to evaluate your novel purely on the strength of your story and not on clumsy and weak prose, overuse of adverbs, repetition, and flabbiness. And in the process, you will learn to become an experienced and competent editor.

    Use these 55 steps to:

    Find redundant adjectives and overused adverbs
    Banish boring words
    Learn dialogue writing
    Write characters more effectively
    Discover over thirty overused words and phrases such as that, it, up/down, was/were, had, even, got, etc.
    Reduce overuse of exclamations and the ellipsis
    Use italics, quotations, and capitalisation properly
    Target word pairs and homophones
    Improve your proofreading and editing skills
    Handle numbers and time effectively
    ...And discover more about flow, show not tell, writing tenses, dialogue handling and more.

    All About Copyediting will not tell you how to write a novel, nor how to write like Tolstoy, or any other author. It will certainly not explain how to write bestselling fiction, how to make money, or guarantee you marketing success. What it will guarantee, is to give your novel the best chance it can get in a tough, competitive, and new publishing world.

    BUY All About Editing and edit your way to success!

    REVIEW EXCERPTS

    "An indispensable guide for amateurs and professionals of any theme of word-based creation."

    "This is a very useful and easily understandeable guide for new writers trying to self publish"

    "A very useful tool to have on hand."

    "A must read for any writer to avoid sending a clanger of a draft to a reviewer or publisher! Great value."

    "The style is clear and accessible. This is a book that I have found invaluable as I rewrite and revise my fiction drafts. Highly recommended"

    "...gives you simple, clear rules and 55 easy steps to check your book for. It won't turn a poor writer into a great one, but it will help you avoid common mistakes and give you tools to turn telling into showing"

    "An extremely useful guide for editing manuscripts, written as a set of editing tips."

    "This is a great resource for authors. I have used it and it works. I highly recommend this book. Great!"

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherK.J. Heritage
    Release dateFeb 22, 2014
    ISBN9781311164421
    All About Copyediting: 55 Easy Edits to Improve Your Writing Skills Forever
    Author

    K.J. Heritage

    K.J.Heritage is an international bestselling UK author of crime mystery, sci-fi and fantasy.His first sci-fi short story, ‘ESCAPING THE CRADLE’ was runner-up in the 2005 Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition. He has also appeared in several anthologies with such self-publishing sci-fi luminaries as Hugh Howey, Michael Bunker and Samuel Peralta.Kev has done all the requisite ‘writery’ jobs such as driver's mate, factory gateman, barman, labourer, telesales operative, sales assistant, warehouseman, IT contractor, Student Union President, university IT helpdesk guy, British Rail signal software designer, premiership football website designer, gigging musician, graphic designer, stand-up comedian, sound engineer, improv artist, magazine editor and web journo. Although he doesn't like to talk about it. Mostly.He was born in the UK in one of the more interesting previous centuries. Originally from Derbyshire, he now lives in the seaside town of Brighton. He is a tea drinker, avid Twitterer (@MostlyWriting), and autistic (ASD) human being.http://mostlywriting.co.uk/join/

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      Book preview

      All About Copyediting - K.J. Heritage

      Before we start

      Let’s get this straight from the outset. This guide is not telling you how to write. It will not try to impose any kind of style to your work. It does not in any way set out to constrain you as a writer.

      This guide will refer to flow, lazy and bad writing, show not tell, etc. So, before we start copyediting, let’s take a look at what is meant by some of these terms.

      In this section:

      i. Show, not tell

      Lights! Camera! Action!

      ii. ‘Bad writing’

      Just what is it?

      iii. Lazy writing

      You can do better.

      iv. Narration vs. dialogue & informality

      Saying it how it is.

      v. Flow

      Following your instincts.

      vi. In summary

      Let the copyediting commence!

      i. Show, Not Tell

      As a writer, you should be aiming to enhance your readership’s connection to your fictional world with every piece of descriptive prose, every sentence of dialogue and every paragraph. You must take every opportunity to help them visualise your story.

      One of the best ways of accomplishing this is to show, not tell. You have the opportunity to tell the reader, second-hand, what is happening or to show it them directly.

      For the purposes of this guide, we have a love triangle between Bill, his wife Margery and interloper, John.

      Telling the reader:

      Bill looked at John, who had one of those roguishly attractive faces that got better with age, at his glinting eyes with secrets hidden behind them, at the rough flock of Irish red hair lying across his forehead.

      Bill is telling us about John, the grammar is passable and all appears good… but can we do better?

      Showing the reader:

      John burst into the room, an eternal rogue in his fifties. All red hair and flashing Irish eyes but furtive, with a rake for a smile, and an air of ‘I don’t give a damn’. He piled into Bill, offering a short stubby hand.

      In the above example we can see and almost feel John.

      In modern fiction, showing is always better than telling. You do not always have to show, but it is important to know the distinction.

      ii. ‘Bad Writing’

      There are grammar experts out there who can pull apart any great piece of literary work and expose its grammatical flaws. Your work will not be any different - it will contain many flaws.

      The trick?

      Don’t let it bother you too much.

      Writing that does not follow the rules or conventions is not, per se, ‘bad writing.’ Far from it.

      Writing should always come from informed choice. Often stylistic concerns and sentence flow will dictate the words you use rather than grammatical rules and convention. But this does not mean that you can abandon grammar altogether. Instead, as a writer, you need to understand these rules and conventions and make informed decisions about when to ignore them.

      Once you have familiarised yourself with the fifty-five steps of this guide, you will notice how some of your favourite authors do not always follow these rules and conventions. Their work is still readable and engaging, they are possibly very successful authors…

      And so we get to the nitty gritty… Just what is ‘bad writing?’

      When I refer to ‘bad writing’ in this guide, I mean: writing that contains unacceptable or poor grammar (grammar that does not work in any context); writing that uses extra and unnecessary words and repeats the same phrases; writing that unintentionally puts the author in a bad

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