The Grasshopper Sunday Edition: Typos, Errors, and Bad Grammar

Even one can cost you readers

I’ll be the first to admit that these three devils sometimes appear in my published writing despite my best efforts at self-editing. And they drive me crazy because, as a reader, when I see them in another writer’s work, I think less of them.

Passing judgement based on an error or typo isn’t really fair, but it has a subconscious effect on my choices to follow or subscribe. Today I read a newsletter by a popular writer on Substack who has successfully published books and earns her living from her newsletter.

It was full of lazy writing. Not just mistakes, lazy writing. What do I mean? Sentences that don’t scan right, errors in tense, repetitive use of words unnecessarily, etc. This writer makes their living with a monthly podcast where she admits she just wings it for an hour talking into her phone.

I’d pay not to have to listen to that.

But I think that podcasting laziness is leaking into her writing.

On the positive side, I have readers on Medium who take the time to send me a private note when they spot an error. I am always grateful for this. Nobody is perfect but if you are consistently sloppy, readers won’t come back for more.

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Attitude adjustment is part of editing

There are two kinds of editing. Copy editing searches for the mistakes listed above. Editorial editing looks to improve the quality of the work. My guess is that most writers working online have not experienced the latter, which is typically associated with having a publishing deal where the publisher or an agent ponies up for an outside editor or provides that service themselves.

Even with publishing deals, that is getting rarer these days and many writers are expected to pay an editor themselves. That can be costly, which is why developing self-editing skills is so critical to success. The first self-editing skill is attitude adjustment.

The attitude you are adjusting is being in love with your words, even the bad ones. This is why actually separating the editing process from the writing process is so critical. When I say separating, I mean physically doing the editing at a later time after writing. 

You need the separation to see the work more clearly. Ideally, with my Medium pieces, I write them in the morning and come back later in the day to edit, or if they are less timely, the next day.

Editorial editing involves tightening up the manuscript, removing scenes that don’t contribute to the pacing, deleting overly descriptive writing, breaking up long sentences, and generally staying focused on the core of the story.

This can be challenging because it often means throwing out good writing that doesn’t fit in the greater scheme of things. It is a lot easier for a third party editor to see these things and be ruthless in cutting them. They will also spot places where the writing needs to get back on track when it gets diverted away from the story.

All of this comes down to pacing, the way the reader moves through the story and anything that makes them want to know what comes next. Even a typo or a badly constructed sentence can throw this forward movement off.

My Google Docs history is littered with these castoffs and some of them are pretty good writing that simply did not fit in well with the flow. I’ve tried to make these sections work but 95% of the time the right thing to do was to hit delete.

After all they’re just words. You can make more.

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Description is often unnecessary or even detrimental 

I love to write lyrical descriptive passages. They’re an indulgence as a writer. But indulgences distract the reader. And, honestly, I don’t particularly like reading them. As a reader I’m building a visualization of how things look in my head and too much description can derail that.

It’s like when they make a movie of a favorite book and it doesn’t look the way you imagined it. Movies are largely visual and action-oriented, but stories need that reader’s imagination as a major component in the reading experience.

Tom Clancy offered a glaring example of this. In The Hunt for Red October he told a fast paced visceral story of a cat and mouse game with wily submariners. But in his later books he became enamored with technology, to the point where a character didn’t just print out a document, he printed it on an HP 3500 six color inkjet printer. 

Some of his stories began to look like opportunities for product placement. That’s when I stopped reading him. It’s too bad because he was a skilled storyteller who did not need all that distracting detail. But I suspect he was such a huge success that his editors were afraid to speak up and let him know this stuff was unnecessary.

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Here in Western NY we are having an incredible fall. The trees are spectacular and we are having weeks of clear blue skies and temps around seventy. It’s a bit unreal because normally this time of year we are scanning the skies for the first snowfall. But I’ll take it.

Thanks for reading! M

884 words

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