by Tammy Ditmore | Jun 9, 2011 | Writing
A few days ago, my son Jonathan proudly announced that he had received a 98 on his major research paper for his eighth-grade English class. My English-professor husband and I had spent a lot of time and energy offering assistance and advice for this project, and we...
by Tammy Ditmore | May 12, 2011 | Editing, Publishing, Writing
As an editor, I spend a lot of time perfecting punctuation marks and verifying information. Determining where an author’s words end and a quote from another source begins can be one of my most difficult challenges. And yet, protecting an author from claims of...
by Tammy Ditmore | May 7, 2011 | Writing
Scared of writing? Don’t know how to start? Or don’t know where to go after you do start? Try this little trick: pretend you’re building with Legos, those irresistible, interlocking, brightly colored, toy building bricks. Whether you want to build a skyscraper or a...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 16, 2011 | Writing
In my last post, I talked about people who struggle with writing because they are convinced it should be easy. At the other end of the spectrum are the folks paralyzed by the fear that written communication is too difficult for them to even contemplate. These are the...
by Tammy Ditmore | Jan 28, 2011 | Writing
I have a good friend whose son is a gifted young computer programmer; he seems to instinctively understand complex equations and willingly spends hours stringing together code to animate a computer game or function. But writing doesn’t come so naturally for him, and...
by Tammy Ditmore | Jan 5, 2011 | Editing, personal reflections, Writing
I’ve been looking for a forum to offer up my wisdom on writing and editing for a long time. Now that I have one, I’m not quite sure where to start. So I guess I’ll try beginning at the beginning—or close to it. My mother tells me that long before I could read my...
