Writing Wednesday

Hey! It's been a week since I (officially) started this blog journey. It's been pretty good.

So, the topic for this Wednesday is editing your writing. I actually get paid to edit business documents and the funny thing is, I was terrible at grammar (still am if I review these posts).

In school, I would never want to learn how to diagram a sentence, finding all the names for the parts of speech tedious. It wasn't until I wanted to write for the fun of it that I actually wanted to learn grammar.

But what to do?

Reading was one choice for me. The more you see it correctly done, the easier it becomes for your to write "correctly" (whatever that really means). Novel writing has some peculiarities compared to grammar and punctuation of normal writing. In addition, the odds are the stuff you learned in grade school has been changed.

The other thing I did? Research. That seems to be one of my strong suits. I searched "how to edit a novel" or common editing mistakes for beginning novelists. There is a ton of information out there (or should I say terabytes of information out there???) I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, listing the advice for everyone when it is already out there, and written pretty well too.

Here are some sites I liked and thought I would share:

Grammar Book- for your grammar needs. This is for everyone. Not just fiction writers.

Novel Writing Help - for punctuating dialogue. One blog, run by editors I believe, stated one cue that the novel was written by a beginner was the incorrectly formatted dialogue. This should help fix that.

Of course, after I write that, I find the blog I mentioned: The Editor's Blog. This links directly to their segment about dialogue.

Here are some more tips that I am still working on: Warrior Writers

Well, that's all for now!