Elements of Style Archives | Crossing Swords https://www.crossing-swords.com/tag/elements-of-style/ Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage - A comparative biography by Cindy Safronoff Sat, 07 Mar 2015 16:59:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Making it Shine https://www.crossing-swords.com/final-polish/ Sat, 07 Mar 2015 16:56:47 +0000 http://www.crossing-swords.com/?p=473 What does it take to make a book shine? An incredible amount of attention to detail, I am learning. Patience, persistence, longsuffering. Now I understand why it typically takes traditional book publishers a full year to publish a book once the author completes the manuscript. And since I am trying to treat Crossing Swords with that same level of […]

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]]> What does it take to make a book shine? An incredible amount of attention to detail, I am learning. Patience, persistence, longsuffering. Now I understand why it typically takes traditional book publishers a full year to publish a book once the author completes the manuscript. And since I am trying to treat Crossing Swords with that same level of care and attention, it is taking longer than I ever expected to complete.  

As much as I desperately want to be done with editing, my professional copy editor has admonished me to make the extra effort to do yet one more round of edits. The book deserves the extra polish, she tells me. After making corrections on punctuation, capitalization, and hyphenation, one of my remaining vices is not rigorously obeying rule #17 from the classic writing book The Elements of Style by Strunk and White: omit needless words. This depth of rewriting is what separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, she tells me. I have promised her I will make one last attempt to be truly professional in my writing.

It is my great hope that this pursuit of perfection will mean having a book that really shines.

bookshine

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