Editing and More
Most Valuable Writing Lesson
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...
Memorial Day (Non)Memories
Every Memorial Day, I find myself musing about a man I never met. He was my husband’s uncle, but Michael never met him either. This would-have-been uncle-in-law died while fighting in the Pacific Theater sometime during World War II. The man I’ve only heard about was...
Quoteable
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...
Writing With Legos
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...
Fearing the Pen (or the Keyboard)
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...
Harder Than It Looks?
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...
Celebrating Martin Luther King
This is a slightly revised version of a column I wrote several years ago that was published in the Ventura County Star. I think it's worthy of revisiting this MLK weekend. For many years, I considered Martin Luther King, Jr., to be a hero--for somebody else. Yes, I...
Your Words Matter
Your Words Matter: I chose this phrase for my home page of this website because I thought it conveyed the essence of my work. At the time, I was thinking about finding just the right words for books and articles, ads and brochures, resumes and application letters. But...
My World of Words
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...