Dangle much?

I saw this on George Takei's Facebook feed, and just had to make a blog post about it. The sub-header on this photo is abysmal! Let's correct the word order so it reads the way it was intended: "After getting made fun of, thousands of women are going to dance with one lucky guy."

What's the problem? A dangling modifier: "After getting made fun of" is a modifier that tells why thousands of women are going to dance with one lucky guy. But the way this sentence is worded, it looks like the women were getting made fun of, and that's why they're dancing.

The headline has the right of it, though. The man was recorded dancing at a club and shamed online, and thousands of women saw his story on the internet and decided to host the dance party.

The sentence obviously doesn't work the way it was originally written, and just changing the word order doesn't help. So, for clarity's sake, we're going to pretend it was written like this: "Thousands of women are going to dance with one lucky guy after he was made fun of online." Or something like that.

Dance on!

The Oxford (or serial) comma can save your dignity.

Another blog post on the utility of editors

This article has some "very" good tips for cleaner writing!

Writers can usually remove well over half of the instances of "that" in their work, but it's insidious! Even the blog post has a few unneeded "thats," such as the one here:

I found this so helpful, that I thought I would share some of her insights.

I do like this analogy quite a bit:

"Good editors are like really talented makeup artists; they recognize and enhance your unique beauty, but don’t completely change the way you look."

That's the name of the game. The semicolon is used correctly in that sentence, but a later sentence in the same paragraph could use some tidying up:

"I don’t actually think she’s frustrated, she doesn’t act like it anyway, the title of this article was purely for comedic value."

An editor could go a few different directions on that one. What do you think?

The comments are interesting, too! One of the commentors pointed out one of the misused semicolons in the piece. Semicolons have many uses:

• Joining two clauses that could stand alone
• Separating serial parts of a sentence in situations where a comma could be confusing
• Winking smiley faces

But when you're introducing examples, a colon should be used instead of a semicolon.

I wrote;
I grew up in a very small, rural town in Canada, where you rarely honked at other drivers other than as a friendly hello, but you often had to honk at a cow to get off the road.

Editor’s change;

I grew up in a tiny rural town in Canada, where you rarely honked at other drivers….

Both of the semicolons in the example above should be replaced with colons.

I adore editing! It's one of the things I can do to help make the world a slightly tidier place.

Editors: what are they worth? Blog post by Theo Fenraven

Really nice post by Theo Fenraven on why editing is important, and how to choose an editor:

https://theofenraven.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/editors-what-are-they-worth/

Zombie editing

I have a pronounced weakness for post-apocalypse fiction. It's not the apocalypse itself that gets me, it's the sociological implications of the collapse and rebuilding. So one of the genres I enjoy happens to be zombie fiction. I've read quite a bit, and I have to say that the recent resurgence of zombies into popular culture has proven to be a boon for those of my ilk.

A very brief list of the books/series I have read and enjoyed:
Newsflesh, by Mira Grant
Apocalypse Z, by Manel Loureiro
and of course, World War Z, by Max Brooks.
Even Diana Gabaldon wrote an Outlander novella with zombies!

I'm reading an interesting zombie series now, and will be dropping the author a line to offer editing services. The books have many errors in word choice, not in spelling. For instance, the survivors used water canon instead of water cannon, and that is just one tiny example. Your average spell-check would pass right by these, but they will catch the eye of the reader. I hope that I can convince the author to engage a professional editor, even if it's someone other than yours truly!

Reddit post: "Don't Insult the Editor"

http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/2t8bmx/query_tip_dont_insult_the_editor/

Here's the text of the original post, and the comments are definitely worth reading as well:


It might be silly to even say this, but I highly advise not insulting agents or editors when responding to rejection letters. Even if they're mean or belittle you, even if you feel like a great injustice has occurred, please just take a breath and move on.

However, if they've treated you in a way you think might not represent the best interests of their publication or company, do figure out who to email that might supervise the agent or editor. Let that person know you've been mistreated.

This happens way too often, and it doesn't make sense to me because my rejection letters usually read as follows:

Thanks again for submitting to [publisher]. Your manuscript had [specific thing that worked well] and [maybe another thing that worked], but because of [reason for rejection] I've decided to pass on it for me.

In today's rejection that prompted this post, I'd given a simple reason: the prose wasn't where it needed to be, that another round or two of revisions were necessary before I could get behind it. The author responded by trying to make me feel bad, shaming me for saying their writing wasn't good enough to be published.

And that sucks for them because such an attitude is going to get you absolutely nowhere if your goal is to find traditional publication. Even if I'd been mean or cruel, it would have been a bad move on the author's part to send a defensive response (or in this case, an attack, since the author seemed less concerned with the possibility of the truth of my assessment and more so with letting me know she didn't approve of how I handled things).

Normally I just delete these emails and move on. But today I recalled how many times I've been in a workshop or read about an author sweeping their Amazon review page or whatever else with the intention of defending their work. You don't need to do this. Your work should stand on its own, to use the cliche (which you shouldn't do in your fiction :P). If an agent doesn't like it, for whatever reason, that means they're not your agent. If they were mean to you, that means they've even less your agent. Sucks for them. Move on and find your agent.

I want to help authors. That's what editors and agents do. We help authors get published. It's really hard to do this job when authors have shitty attitudes. Agents and editors can have shitty attitudes too, and that's bad for them and the publishers and clients they work with, but a quick and easy way to drastically increase your ability to be published is to treat other people in the industry how you'd want to be treated. Don't lash out at an editor because of a rejection; stop and listen to the reasons for the rejection. This author could have instead asked for clarification, which I would have happily provided. Instead they got their email deleted and have less of a chance to get their book published.

TL:DR: be nice, yo.

Thesaurus Club