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This will help polish up your prose and allow your work to shine. Developmental editing , substantive editing , line editing , and copy editing each tackle a specific problem or concern with your writing. Editors have extensive tools and training that, when properly wielded, will make your prose sing. What is editing?
Not so much functionally—there are people who can help you write cleaner prose. I hire a copyeditor to clean up my posts, and while the ideas, connections, turns of phrase, overall structure and layout are mine, it still feels inauthentic. Write with a copyeditor. So here’s my response. Persistence pays.
And I was reading through these, and at the time I was a nonfiction proofreader and copyeditor, sorting out other people's work, and I was reading these stories just going like these are—like I didn't understand the medium of short stories very well, and obviously, if you're going to start anywhere, start with Stephen King.
But somewhere in the last century, the shouty little mark fell out of fashion in literary prose. Editors today frown on excessive exclaiming even in mainstream fiction, outside of books for young children and comic books. It was a vinyl copy of Help! ) (Samuel Richardson, Pamela , 43). She was alive!
In the third example, the clipped prose style begs for “Harder than the bullet,” which happens to be grammatically correct. It’s not that a gangster can’t use standard English; the problem is the inconsistency between the slangy “Yeah, shut up” and the use of “fewer” where “less” would be more natural.
It’s different from emerging to resent the copyeditor; appreciating the prose is part of reading for pleasure. But why shouldn’t a reader emerge from a story now and then to observe and admire the artist at work? McBride is far from the first novelist to use long sentences effectively.
I’m also convinced that it produces unoriginal prose that’s much stiffer and more cramped. For years I edited every line to perfection before moving on, and when I finished a piece it was completely finished. But I’m convinced that stopping to edit as you go makes writing much more painful and takes much longer. A.
That can be good, in one way, because you do have time to really reflect and dig deep, and write better prose, months and months of structural edits, like three or four versions of it. Because not only is it my schedule, it's their editor's schedule, and the line editor, the copyeditor, each person, their schedule.
The grain of truth: “Said” followed by a pronoun (“said she”) is more at home in poetry or highly lyrical prose. Why it’s not true: “Because it’s demonstrably silly,” said the copyeditor. And inconvenient,” added the intern. Maybe the myth arose from an unwarranted extrapolation from those contexts.
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