Proofreading & Editing Tips

This morning, during an edit for a weekly newsletter I proofread, I came across this line: Golfers will register to play on a first-come, first-serve basis. My client’s organization is hosting a golf tournament in September where member businesses can get together,...

Every so often, editing serves up a little treat: the “fun catch”—a word that is spelled correctly and is perfectly ordinary, but it’s the wrong word. These slip-ups often sneak past spellcheck because they are real words. Homophones are common culprits: “their” for...

Early in my editing career—on my very first assignment, in fact—I learned one of the most important lessons I’ve carried with me ever since: An editor’s job is not to make the writing sound like them. It’s to make the writing sound like the best version of the author....

The other day, I took a spelling test. Among the words it asked me to check were committment, wholey, principly, slurr, and totaly. These misspellings felt like old friends—words I’ve corrected in manuscripts time and again over the years. I dutifully fixed them to...

My oldest daughter has a pretty nifty job working with kids. As she gears up to plan summer programming, one of her ideas is a daytime club for kids—full of crafts, games, snacks, and sunshine (the last one is debatable, though. After all, we live in the PNW). “Mom,”...

It’s minimalist. It’s chaotic. It’s a little bit poetic in a defiant way. whatifwedidnteverusepunctuationandcapitalization brings a certain vibe to writing—equal parts experimental and rebellious. It dares readers to slow down and decode rather than skim. And for a...

I attend a small Lutheran church with pretty stained-glass windows. It’s a beautiful place filled with kind people and, as my youngest daughter recently pointed out, a surprising number of men named Bill. The comment came after I told her a story about one of the...

Let it land. Let it linger. Let it echo. You've just experienced anaphora. While your high school English teacher may have scolded you for repetition, anaphora proves that sometimes breaking the rules creates the most memorable writing. What Is This Fancy-Sounding...

Have you ever noticed how certain phrases stick in your mind long after you've read them? Many memorable quotes and powerful statements share a common literary technique: parallelism. What Is Parallelism? Parallelism is a figure of speech in which two or more elements...

We’ve all had those moments when grammar gets tangled, and we commit what I like to call a speech-o—like a typo but spoken. One of the most common mix-ups I hear is this: “Her and I went to the store.” Not nearly as often, maybe once in a blue moon, I'll hear...