WordHippo

It's been a very long time since I've posted. I've been busy with various projects, updating my guidebook and editing a novel among them. One website I stumbled across and like is WordHippo - try it and you'll see right away what it can do.

Commonly confused words

This webpage has a good list of words spelled similarly which people often mix up.

One that doesn't appear on the list, but which I've seen several times when editing, is complement and compliment.

The former is more often a verb than a noun. It means to add something which enhances or perfects, for example:

The red wine he chose complemented the steak.

The latter is a verb or noun meaning to praise someone, for instance if you say, "Your cooking is excellent" or "You did a great job on that essay."

When "to" isn't needed

If you need to reduce word count, look for instances where to can be dropped. Here are two examples: 

Your excellent institution can provide greater opportunities for his growth and help him to realize his potential.

She has helped me to improve my tennis.

When "both" isn't needed

The word both is often used in situations where it adds neither clarity nor elegance. For instance:

Both my wife and I enjoy cycling.
 
The chef tasted both the main course and the dessert before sending them to the customers.
 
There's no need to use both in the sentences above because the two items have been identified. Both is only required when you don't otherwise make it clear you're referring to two people, two objects etc.

What people mean when they say "editing"

"Don't just proof it," I'm told by some of my editing clients. "Tell me which are the best bits and which are the worst bits. If there's anything that should be taken out, let me know. And if there's anything that should be expanded, tell which direction I should go in."

When quoting a price for my services, I always examine the unedited text, note its length and estimate how many hours I'll have to spend on it. Also, I ask the client what exactly he/she wants: basic proofreading, copyediting or full content editing - terms clearly explained in this recent article.

Yet more superfluous words

Writing about Taiwan's countryside recently, I typed out these two sentences, and immediately saw words that would be better be taken out. As in the previous post, the superfluous words are bolded.

To give cityfolk a taste of farming life and the satisfaction of nurturing something which they can later eat...

Some sanheyuan are cramped; others have more than enough space for an extended family of 15.

Which often appears on lists of perennial candidates for editing out. More than is often not needed. If a house (a sanheyuan is a traditional Taiwanese bungalow) can accommodate more than 15 people, it obviously has enough space for 15; two words can be dropped, and you can get closer to your target word count.

Cutting out words that often aren't needed

When I finish an article, I put it aside and work on something else for a little while. I then go back to the just-finished piece and read it through. I'm looking, of course, for errors and omissions. But I'm also looking for words which can and should be removed. 

If you're struggling to make your writing tighter, or battling to get the wordcount down to what your editor wants, take a close look at every the and that. A good many of them can be done away with, you'll find. In the two examples below (from a writing project I finished a few days ago) the words in bold can be dropped:

Of all the festivals, my personal favorite is the Nantou City Sand Sculpture Festival.

You can be sure that every taxi driver knows how to get there.

A golden opportunity missed

Some years ago, in a self-published book written by an American about his frustrating experiences studying martial arts in China, I came across a marvelous potential hook, buried midway through the volume. In a photo caption which bookstore browsers would almost certainly likely miss were the words: “...holding the sword I had to use on the day I left the school.”

I've no recollection of the image it referred to, but the words have stayed in my mind. As soon as I read them, I realized the author should have put them in the book's very first paragraph. Had he done so, he would've hooked a good few readers. They would've said to themselves: “What on Earth happened? Did the author have to fight his way out of the martial-arts school? Who tried to stop him leaving and why? Was blood spilled?”

And they would've continued reading until they found out.

Since then, whenever I'm close to finishing an article, I scour it for potential hooks.

A classic start to a book

The first 90 words of Redmond O'Hanlon's 1996 travel book Congo Journey are superb:

     In her hut in Poto-Poto, the poor quarter of Brazzaville, the feticheuse, smiling at us, knelt on the floor, drew out a handful of cowrie shells from the cloth bag at her waist, and cast them across the raffia mat.

     Lary Shaffer and I, despite ourselves, leaned forward on our wooden stools, studying the meaningless pattern; the shells, obviously much handled, shone like old ivory in the glow of the paraffin lamp. The feticheuse stopped smiling.

     “One of you,” she said slowly in French, “is very ill, right now.”

I'm going to list the reasons why I think this works so well.

Firstly, before even reaching the end of the first sentence, we want to read on, if only to find out what a feticheuse is. Later, the reader discovers that a feticheuse is a shamaness; the word derives from the French for “fetish,” and fetishes loom large in the second half of the book.

Secondly, when we read “The feticheuse stops smiling...,” we know something is wrong. You want to find out what it is. Who is ill, and what's wrong with him?

Thirdly, the beginning of the book is sprinkled with clues that we're not in safe, familiar Western territory. The lady lives in a hut; there's a raffia map on the floor; the tools of her trade include cowrie shells; there's no electricity, just a paraffin lamp. Readers of travel books want the exotic, and O'Hanlon delivers the goods from the get go.

The message here is that you don't need to start your story at the very beginning. Find an engaging episode (“the hook”) that'll draw the reader in, and then backtrack if explanation/elaboration/elucidation is needed.

In my next post, I'll discuss an instance where an author had the raw material for a great hook, but failed to use it where he should have.

The writer's mind-set

"The curse of being a songwriter is that you no longer listen to music, you deconstruct it. You take it apart to see why it succeeds or fails."

So says Ellis Paul, an American singer-songwriter born 1965. His thinking is exactly the same as many writers, including myself. Whatever we read, we're wondering what we can learn about the way it was written, and how we can use those tricks in our own writing.  

Interviewing: Why you must quote

Quotes are essential for two reasons. Without them, you're unlikely to convince the reader that the article contains more than your own opinion. And it goes with saying that good quotes greatly enliven an article.

Quotes usually come from living people, but they don't have to. You may well find relevant and engrossing quotes in books, letters, diaries and media reports – and even in studies produced for think tanks and government agencies. In this short article, originally published as a sidebar to a much longer piece, I got all the quotes from previously published (if obscure) sources.

You may even find something useful in a work of fiction. If you've been commissioned to write about something which may happen but hasn't yet, science fiction is likely to provide some insights. If you're writing about how human settlers could survive on the surface of Mars, the obvious source would be Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.

Editing work: A crutch for writers, or a distraction?

A crutch, for sure.

Sometimes writers ask me whether I think taking on editing work is a good idea. The answer - unless you're making a lot of money from your own writing - is a resounding "Yes."

Researching and writing an article is almost always more satisfying than polishing another person's work. Producing a book is better still. Nevertheless, there are good reasons – over and above any desire to pay bills and put food on the table – why you should accept editing assignments.

Each year for the last eight, I've devoted a good part of the late autumn and winter to a well-paid but awfully dull editing job. Doing lots of editing has taught me some useful skills. I've learned how to say the same thing in a dozen different ways. I've gotten much better at spotting phrases which, while not bad English, could be made more elegant. I can pare any text without losing substance. As I've said before, any kind of language work will make you a better writer.

Also, editing sometimes leads to article ideas. Even if, in terms of subject matter, there's almost no overlap between the editing cases you get and what you like to write about, you're sure to have a number of “I didn't know that” moments. When you start to think like a writer, ideas will come thick and fast.

Online thesaurus

Anyone who writes needs to have a thesaurus at hand at all times. I've given up using my paperback thesaurus, as I find Thesaurus.com more convenient and more comprehensive. Unfortunately, I've not found an online dictionary nearly as satisfactory.

In case you're wondering, I'm not being paid for this plug!

A Veteran's Advice V

Read, read, read

I'm with Vossler on this one, too. As he puts it, “Read for pleasure, yes, but study what you read.” This is closely related to the mimicking habit mentioned above. Of course, not everything you enjoy reading will be applicable to the writing you're trying to sell. For example, I adore the novels of Martis Amis, but his pessimistic-comedic view of modern English life simply isn't relevant to my feature articles about Taiwan.

Read with a notebook close at hand, and not just to jot down new words (learned just the other day: muniment) and endearing phrases (recently I added “float your boat” to my palette; it's far more elegant than “yank your chain”). Reading will help you generate story ideas. Example: I've been reading about peak oil, and I'm starting to wonder what Taiwan is doing in the way of contingency planning.

A Veteran's Advice IV

Rewrite

Bill Vossler is absolutely correct. If I go through an article which I think I've finished, I often find tiny errors – and I always find superfluous words. However, when tinkering with your text, do bear in mind that the law of diminishing returns soon kicks in.

If you've completed the article ahead of deadline, it's often better to submit it to the editor right away, rather than fiddle with it until the very last minute. Many editors are grateful if work comes in ahead of time. I know this because editors have told me. Also, when I worked as a managing editor, items that came in early usually ended up looking especially good in the magazine because I'd had enough time to polish them, and to find appropriate images.

When rewriting, you need to be willing to cut whole sentences and sometimes entire paragraphs. This can hurt if you've put a lot of time and thought into them. Save these off-cuts; you might be able to use them in an article on the same topic that's longer or which takes a different tack.

A Veteran's Advice III

Mimic

“Imitate the writers you admire,” states Bill Vossler. Rather than mimicry, I've always thought of this as reverse engineering. If the beginning of an article is especially memorable, see how it can be adapted to serve your purposes. The same goes with an ending.

I devised the introduction for the Taoyuan City section of my Bradt guide after reading in an old Bangkok guidebook that modern-day visitors to Silom Road struggle to believe it used to be an area of rice fields and windmills. (Silom means “windmill.”) This is what I came up with:

It’s hard to picture Taoyuan as an orchard full of blossoming peach trees. Yet that’s how it looked two centuries ago, and that’s why this manufacturing center with almost 400,000 inhabitants has a name that strikes 21st-century visitors as perversely bucolic: táo (peach) yuán (garden)...

A Veteran's Advice I

In an article I downloaded years ago, but which seems to have since disappeared from the face of the Internet, American writer Bill Vossler spells out what he calls “Six simple secrets to writing success.”

He claims to have had well over 2,000 articles published, plus several books, so his advice is probably worth heeding. Over the two weeks, I'll post his six tips, together with my comments. Here's no. 1.

Write, write, and write some more

In his best-seller Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell emphasizes the importance of practice. He goes on at length about the “10,000-hour rule,” asserting that only those with 10,000 hours of experience under their belts can expect to become masters at what they do.

That's equivalent to five years' working full time, and thinking about it that way may well discourage you. But if you're the kind of person who's always enjoyed writing well (I rarely found high school essays a chore, and when backpacking through India and Nepal in my early 20s I took great pleasure in composing long letters home) you've already clocked up a good many hours.

That's no reason to be complacent, however. Vossler urges would-be writers to write every day: “If you write you will improve your writing.” I agree with him. While I don't work on articles or books every day, I do use language with precision each day, be it editing, crafting emails to editors (people bound to notice if I make mistakes or write sloppily), or simply reading carefully the work of excellent writers.

The Smoking Pen

Why 'The Smoking Pen'?

It's a nickname given to me by an old friend, and recognition that I'm a productive member of my profession.

I make a living as a writer and editor. I've had three books published since 2001; I've sold more than 700 articles to magazines, newspapers and websites over the past 15 years; and I've edited thousands of booklets, articles and documents for clients which include government agencies. In the past two years, I've helped two previously-published writers improve their work and attain greater success.

So you want to be a writer?

I'm launching this blog because aspiring writers sometimes ask for my help. Through the blog I'm going to share some of what I learned along the way, but not everything. Whether you're a new writer trying to make your first sale, or already have a track record, I can offer tailor-made online tutoring as well as editing services. I can share my research methods, and teach you how to generate ideas and pitch them to editors.

To find out more, contact me at stevencolincrook (one word, no periods, no underscores) (at) gmail (dot) com.