How to improve writing (no. 69)
Writing that represents the speech of someone fleeing an erupting volcano should exhibit greater terseness, greater urgency.
How to improve writing (no. 68)
I don’t read New Yorker prose (or any prose I’m not editing) looking for things to change: these passages presented themselves to me (or to my bad-sentence radar) as prose in need of repair.
How to improve writing (no. 67)
Ford Madox Ford’s page-ninety test (and it is page ninety, not ninety-nine), can yield amazing results.
How to improve writing (no. 66)
A partial sentence from a short piece at The New Yorker website.
How to improve writing (no. 65); or, CBS, sheesh
“Commander-in-chiefs” and other problems: improving a CBS This Morning story about Ken Burns.
How to improve writing (no. 64)
A bad sentence in The New York Times.
How to improve writing (no. 63)
From The New Yorker website, a sentence that needs rethinking.
How to improve writing (no. 62)
From the bag holding a baguette.
How to improve writing (no. 61)
Omit needless words, Mark Trail.
How to improve writing (no. 60)
A sentence from Reuters.
How to improve writing (no. 59)
“Luckily, the situation could have been far worse.”
How to improve writing (no. 58)
“The current investigation is ongoing.”
How to improve writing (no. 57)
When you speak in speech balloons, save some helium.
How to improve writing (no. 56)
A disappointing sentence from USA Today.
How to improve writing (no. 55)
Improving Mark Trail.
How to improve writing (no. 54)
Improving Mark Trail.
How to improve writing (no. 53)
If sentences are, as Richard Lanham says, attention economies, they must respect a reader’s time and intelligence. Revision is courtesy.
How to improve writing (no. 52)
Different from, not than.
How to improve writing (no. 51)
A ponderous start, needless words, and general lifelessness.
How to improve writing (no. 50)
“I don’t think a copyeditor can be held responsible for mistakes in a writer’s prose.”
How to improve writing (no. 49)
When you’re composing a bulk e-mail, never forget that you’re composing a bulk e-mail.
Subject-verb disagreement in the New York Times
In Garrison Keillor’s review of Deborah Solomon’s Norman Rockwell biography.
Recently updated
Making a sentence better still.
How to improve writing (no. 47)
Take that, Charlie Rose.
How to improve writing (no. 46)
Fixing another Mark Trail speech balloon.
Orange Crate Art: How to improve writing (no. 45)
To my eyes, the writer has crammed too many bits of information into one sentence — a problem one sees again and again in news writing.
How to improve writing (no. 44)
Mark Trail and “however.”
How to improve writing (no. 43)
The work I did to improve two sentences in a recent post.
How to improve writing (no. 42)
“The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you — unlike any other schooling that you have ever known before.”
How to improve writing (no. 41)
This post is the first to improve my writing.