Category: Editing

I once spent three weeks on a ghostwriting project for a CEO who insisted on “finding his voice,” only to realize he hadn’t actually decided if he was a formal academic or a guy who drinks craft beer in a flannel shirt. We weren’t dealing with a lack of inspiration; we were dealing with a total lack of framework. Most gurus will tell you that learning how to build a house style is about capturing “essence” or “magic,” but that’s just expensive nonsense. In reality, a house style is a set of guardrails designed to stop you from tripping over…

I once spent three days on a high-stakes corporate manuscript, only to realize during the final pass that the client’s internal manual and their primary brand guide were in a state of total, unmitigated war. I was staring at a screen of conflicting rules—Oxford commas in one chapter, none in the next—and realizing that understanding how style guides differ isn’t just a pedantic academic exercise; it is a matter of protecting your billable hours. If you don’t nail down which authority is king before you touch the first sentence, you aren’t editing; you’re just performing expensive, repetitive guesswork that eats…

I spent my third year in publishing listening to “visionaries” talk about the divine spark of inspiration, as if waiting for a lightning bolt is a viable business model. They treat writing like a mystical visitation, but let me tell you something: if you are waiting to feel like writing before you sit down, you aren’t a professional, you’re a hobbyist with an expensive habit. In my twenty-one years of ghostwriting and editing, I’ve learned that the secret to how consistency is maintained isn’t found in a meditation retreat or a new productivity app; it is found in the unsexy,…

I was sitting in a windowless editing suite in Soho back in 2004, staring at a manuscript that had just cost the client three extra weeks of my billable time because they couldn’t stop circling the same three adjectives. The author had been told by some “writing guru” that repetition was a sign of a rich, rhythmic vocabulary, but in reality, it was just clutter. Most people think you can avoid it by hunting for synonyms like they’re playing a high-stakes game of Scrabble, but that’s a mistake that costs you both clarity and money. Learning how to handle repetition…

I once spent three days staring at a manuscript that looked less like a narrative and more like a brick of grey, unyielding granite. The author was brilliant, certainly, but they had treated their prose like a marathon with no water stations, completely ignoring how paragraphing guides a reader through the emotional shifts of a scene. They thought long, unbroken blocks of text signaled “seriousness” or “literary depth,” but all they actually achieved was making me want to close the file and take a very long nap. In reality, a wall of text isn’t art; it’s a barrier to entry…

I once spent a grueling forty-eight hours staring at a manuscript for a client who insisted on using semicolons like they were expensive pieces of jewelry—sprinkled liberally to make the prose look “literary” and sophisticated. It wasn’t. It was just cluttered, exhausting, and, quite frankly, a waste of my hourly rate. Most writing guides treat the semicolon as some mystical, high-brow secret, but in the real world of professional publishing, knowing how the semicolon should be used is less about looking smart and more about structural efficiency. If you’re using them to bridge thoughts that don’t actually belong together, you…

I once spent three weeks staring at a manuscript for a mid-list thriller, watching a perfectly good plot die a slow, agonizing death simply because the author treated every sentence like a legal deposition. They had all the right ingredients, but they didn’t understand how to use punctuation for pace; instead, they used commas like speed bumps and periods like brick walls. It’s a common mistake that makes even the most gripping scenes feel like reading a technical manual for a toaster. People will tell you that pacing is about “flow” or “vibe,” but that’s just fluff. In reality, pacing…

I was sitting in a windowless office in Bloomsbury back in 2004, staring at a manuscript that was technically “correct” but felt like reading a dry legal deposition. The author had been told by every writing workshop in existence that passive voice was a cardinal sin, so they had scrubbed it so thoroughly that the prose had lost its pulse entirely. Most people think they understand how passive voice actually works, but they usually fall into one of two camps: the terrified amateur who deletes every instance of “was” like it’s a typo, or the academic who uses it to…

I remember sitting in a cramped, windowless office in Bloomsbury back in 2004, staring at a manuscript that was technically “brilliant” but physically exhausting to read. The author was a darling of the literary scene, yet every page was cluttered with justs, reallys, and actuallys that acted like sand in a gearbox. I realized then that most writing advice focuses on the wrong things; people obsess over “voice” while ignoring the fact that how filler words weaken sentences is often the primary reason a reader stops paying attention. You aren’t just being wordy; you are actively devaluing your own authority…

I remember sitting in a cramped, windowless office in Bloomsbury back in ’98, staring at a manuscript that was essentially a graveyard of adjectives. The author had spent three months polishing every sentence, convinced that “more” meant “better,” while I sat there calculating how much of my actual life was being swallowed up by their wordiness. Most writing gurus will tell you that tightening your work is about finding your “voice” or waiting for a moment of divine inspiration, but that’s a lie designed to sell expensive masterclasses. If you want to know how to tighten prose, you don’t need…