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10 Invisible Writing Mistakes

Monday, January 12th, 2004 at 7:55 PM Category: Meryl's Notes Blog 2 comments

10 mistakes writers don’t see that are easily fixed when they do is right on. I admit I have a few crutch words and it makes me crazy. I knew about this crutch word habit before reading the article and sometimes I admit I occasionally become lazy trying to look up alternatives.

William K. Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, taught me to avoid empty adverbs and I’ve been trying to pass on the lesson to other writers who ask me to edit their work. Such words are there to add an exclamation to a point, but they’re over-used that they don’t do the job anymore. Keep it to a minimum and they’ll do their job or find a way around it.

Lists are a challenge when doing software reviews in the process of describing the product’s features. Work around this by keeping the list short and describe a couple of features in detail. Though this article concentrates on fiction or storytelling, such tips work well in non-fiction works. Bryan Eisenberg shared his mentor’s(Roy H. Williams) advice, “to write non-fiction as if writing fiction and to write fiction as if writing non-fiction.” [Via Darren Barefoot]