Copyediting. Vital. Do It or Have It Done.
Maybe most apprentice writers don’t think that copyediting and proofreading manuscripts are issues of craft, but if they don’t, they’re wrong. These are the most basic craft matters in the book, in any book. Professional writing must be 100% clean. It must be free of errors in punctuation, usage, mechanics, and spelling. No typos. Period....
On the “Speedy Narrative”
Teaching an advanced nonfiction course this spring, I assigned Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. Just about everybody loved the book, for a number of reasons—the vivid writing, the sense of detail, the humor and frankness of her account of her gradual coming to faith. As I tried to understand how she achieved these effects, it occurred to me that often...
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