Comments on: Line Editing in 10 Easy Steps

By: yt sumner

yt sumner — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:22:04 +0000

This is one of those things I’m going to print off and pin above my desk. Thanks for such helpful reminders.

By: Tony McFadden

Tony McFadden — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:22:50 +0000

I use the ’speech’ function in Scrivener to read a chapter at a time. While the intonation is Stephen Hawking-ish, I caught my characters saying ‘hey’ far too much. And ‘yeah’. And ’so’. And ‘okay’. And…you get the point.

I’ve also done a global search on ‘was’ to find uses of passive voice. Works a charm.

By: Cassandra Jade

Cassandra Jade — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:45:00 +0000

An excellent post. I found it really difficult to idenitfy repeated words but using the find in word and searching for a few common offenders made it really clear how often I overused certain words.
Thanks so much for this.

By: Elspeth Antonelli

Elspeth Antonelli — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:17:35 +0000

What a marvelous post! I’m bookmarking it. I’m glad I’ve found your blog.

Elspeth

By: Tere Kirkland

Tere Kirkland — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:51:11 +0000

These are great tips! I’d like to quote from your article and link back here for my blog post tomorrow. Doing a series on revisions, and this is just the thing.

Thanks!

By: Nancy Watts

Nancy Watts — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:41:05 +0000

Thanks, these are useful tips.

By: Bonita Kale

Bonita Kale — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:33:37 +0000

Number Eight! If a sentence justwon’t come right, I take it as a sign that it wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.

By: Paul Baughman

Paul Baughman — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:32:17 +0000

Re #10, that reminds me of a Japanese proverb I heard many years ago. I did a quick google search and couldn’t find any references to what I remember. Apologies in advance for butchering any of the details.

A rich man commissioned an artist for a painting of a cat. After a month, with no painting, he spoke to the artist, who told him to come back later. A month later, he again asked the artist for his painting and was told to come back later. This went on for many months. Finally, after a year of pleading and waiting and pleading some more, the rich man stormed into the artist’s house and demanded his painting or his money back.

The artist grabbed a handy piece of paper, brush and ink and dashed off a painting which he handed to the rich man. The man was amazed at the life-like realism of the seemingly off-hand effort. It was the most beautiful cat he had ever seen.

He turned to the artist and asked: “If you could paint such a wonderful picture with no effort, why did you make me wait?”

The artist opened a closet and showed the rich man the hundreds of discarded paintings of cats.

–
I love this story because it illustrates that even with talent, it takes hard work to become a true artist. It lets me hope that I have potential to become an artist.

By: Line Editing Links

Line Editing Links — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 22:48:52 +0000

[...] Line Editing in 10 easy steps [...]

By: Linda

Linda — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:20:57 +0000

For #1, I found more words than than (i.e., a bit, a little, a little bit, just, etc.), so I used Word’s autocorrect to automatically capitalize them. That way, I’ll see immediately how often I’m using the qualifiers and I can work on eliminatingthem as I write.