My editing advice column, Ask Dr. Editor, is now available through UniversityAffairs.ca. This Ask Dr. Editor column describes the political significance of the non-specific pronouns “he,” “she,” and “they”: “The politics of pronouns: The singular “they” and your power to choose as an academic writer.” Have a question you want me to answer? Contact me!
Category Archives: Sentence-Level Editing
#AskDrEditor: How, when and why to use readability formulas to improve your academic writing
My editing advice column, Ask Dr. Editor, is now available through UniversityAffairs.ca. This Ask Dr. Editor column describes how readability formulas work, and the few academic contexts in which readability formulas are helpful and appropriate: “How, when and why to use readability formulas to improve your academic writing There are many tools that measure readabilityContinue reading “#AskDrEditor: How, when and why to use readability formulas to improve your academic writing”
#AskDrEditor: Borrowing fresh eyes for your academic writing
My editing advice column, Ask Dr. Editor, is now available through UniversityAffairs.ca. The seventh Ask Dr. Editor column describes how to use three of my favourite free online algorithms to support your editing processes: “Borrowing Fresh Eyes for Your Academic Writing.” Have a question you want me to answer? Contact me!
25 words
Your sentences are too long. Shorten your sentences! As an editor, I’m more descriptive instead of prescriptive. I know that audience, context and genre shape meaning. Language is a shifting beast–but more problematically than that, the so-called ‘rules’ of grammar and writing are arbitrary, classist, colonialist, even wrong. But I’m still going to tell youContinue reading “25 words”
Making paragraphs flow
We all know that good paragraphs cohere around a single topic and are book-ended by strong, analytical take-away sentences. But how can a disjointed, staccato-sounding paragraph be made to have flow? Flow is an elusive quality — it’s the sense that sentences move logically and seamlessly without repetition or heavy-handed transitioning. Sometimes this flow comesContinue reading “Making paragraphs flow”
Intensifiers don’t
Intensifiers — the adverbs and adjectives that writers include to add force to their expression — don’t have the effect that some imagine they might. Take these two examples: Dave is a trustworthy employee. Dave is a really trustworthy employee. In which of these examples might a reader be left wondering if Dave will beContinue reading “Intensifiers don’t”
Words to watch for: zombie nouns
“The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.” In her New York Times essay, the academic and writer Helen Sword terms “nominalizations” — that is, nouns that contains within them shorter verbs, adjectives, or other nouns — “zombie nouns” because they “cannibalize active verbs,Continue reading “Words to watch for: zombie nouns”
Words to watch for: the hollow verbs
“Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion“: TS Eliot’s eponymous “hollow men” are said to represent Western culture after the First World War. It’s obviously a dramatic overstatement for me to apply Eliot’s post-apocalyptic words to a list of hollow verbs. And yet …