Isolation is both best friend and worst enemy to a writer. Writers need solitude to be productive, but too much solitude makes them admire their texts instead of going the distance to revise their drafts. So, at some point, even good writers need to be coached on their writing. In our culture, we’re more familiar… Continue Reading
If you write or edit more than one document a day or work with other writers and editors, you need a style guide to provide guidance on style (language conventions with respect to spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and typographic arrangement and display). You can create a style guide at the personal, department, or corporate level (depending… Continue Reading
I recently sent a document out for review; I had designed and created it to be a series of alphabetical listings. One reviewer asked for a table of contents. I couldn’t figure that out, as A, B, C, D seemed pretty easy to navigate to me. I asked her why she thought a TOC would… Continue Reading
Well, it depends…let’s define the two activities and you can decide! What a writing coach does A coach (who also may be called a tutor) assesses your skill level in a certain type of activity and helps you raise your performance to another level. For example, I have a business coach, Michael Sunnarborg, who helps… Continue Reading
I always regret that I cannot be a perfect editor, although I aim for perfection.That’s why I use “PerfectIt,” software from Intelligent Editing that states on its website that it “is the fastest way to find consistency mistakes.” Sure enough, it checks for consistency of hyphenation; capitalization; numbers/words; capitalization in headings; abbreviations and acronyms (definitions/spelling);… Continue Reading
As a freelance editor, I spend a lot of time changing authors’ texts. That’s my job. It wasn’t until I experienced the editing process firsthand before publishing my book, Business Matters, that I truly realized what other authors may know: It’s hard on the ego to be edited. When I saw the edits, I didn’t… Continue Reading