18 Interesting and Inspirational Quotes About Editing and Proofreading

18 Interesting and Inspirational Quotes About Editing and Proofreading If you think the business of writing is difficult- try editing. In fact, both writers and editors alike have a lot to say about the often-frustrating process of whittling words and emotions down to only the best. Heres our list of 18 quotes about editing that keep it real.So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.Dr. SeussKill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribblers heart, kill your darlings.Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the CraftTo me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. Its definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. Theres no page of prose in existence that its author cant improve after its bee n in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level – every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that Im amazed I ever struggled with them.Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling – you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?Charles FinchWriting without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.Patricia FullerWhile writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.Tiffany MadisonEditors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that authors intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies dont make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the authors mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?. Monet would be ripping his hair out.We never end up with the book we began writing. Characters twist it and turn it until they get the life that is perfect for them. A good writer wont waste their time arguing with the characters they create...It is almost always a waste of time and people tend to stare when you do!C.K. WebbWhen an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. In other words, the stuff of great books.Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the TreesA good editor doesnt rewrite words, she rewires synapses.S. Kelley HarrellThis leads me to the Higher Editing. Take of well-ground Indian Ink as much as suffices and a camel-hair brush proportionate to the inter-spaces of your lines. In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and when thou hast done, repent not. The shorter the tale, the longer the brushwork and, normally, the s horter the lie-by, and vice versa. The longer the tale, the less brush but the longer lie-by. I have had tales by me for three or five years which shortened themselves almost yearly. The magic lies in the Brush and the Ink. For the Pen, when it is writing, can only scratch; and bottled ink is not to compare with the ground Chinese stick. Experto crede.Rudyard Kipling, Something of MyselfThe first draft is black and white. Editing gives the story color.Emma HillWriting is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you dont see them.Elie WieselWhen you write a story, you are telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking ou t all the things that are NOT the story...Your stuff starts out being just for you...but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right, as right as you can...it belongs to anyone who wants to read it, or criticise it.Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the CraftAn editor doesnt just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: those who can read see twice as well. Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribes title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = to write); and the symbol for Nisaba , the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good.In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves- this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it.Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing YourselfEditing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.Stephanie RobertsLet the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.Ralph Waldo Emer sonDont cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didnt mean to write, leave it.) Dont worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Dont even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.) Lose control. Dont think. Dont get logical. Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer WithinLearn to enjoy this tidying process. I dont like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I fe el that Im coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game.William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing NonfictionIve reached that final moment of editing a book- the one where the text manifests as a living breathing person and starts slugging me in the face.Richard Due

Nonstandard English Definition and Examples

Nonstandard English Definition and Examples Nonstandard English refers to any dialect of English other than Standard English  and is sometimes referred to as  nonstandard dialect or non-standard variety.  The term Nonstandard English is sometimes used disapprovingly  by non-linguists to describe bad or incorrect English. Examples and Observations It is no simple matter to define the difference between a standard and a nonstandard variety of language. However, for our purposes, we can define a standard dialect as one that draws no negative attention to itself... On the other hand, a nonstandard dialect does draw negative attention to itself; that is, educated people might judge the speaker of such a dialect as socially inferior, lacking education, and so on. A nonstandard dialect can thus be characterized as having socially marked forms, such as aint. A socially marked form is one that causes the listener to form a negative social judgment of the speaker.It is important to understand that identifying a dialect as standard or nonstandard is a sociological judgment, not a linguistic one.(F. Parker and K. Riley, Linguistics for Nons of widespread nonstandard grammatical forms in English include multiple negation.(Peter Trudgill, Introducing Language and Society. Penguin, 1992) In fiction nonstandard forms are mostly found in dialogue and they are used as a powerful tool to reveal character traits or social and regional differences.(Irma Taavitsainen, et al., Writing in Nonstandard English. John Benjamins, 1999) Nonstandard Usage in Huckleberry Finn I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldnt seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. Id see him standing my watch on top of hisn, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and suchlike times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was. And at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the  only  one hes got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because Id got to decide, fo rever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:All right, then, Ill go to hell- and tore it up.(Mark Twain,  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884) The kinds of errors that Huck makes [in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] are by no means haphazard; Twain carefully placed them to suggest Hucks basic illiteracy but not to overwhelm the reader. Nonstandard verb forms constitute Hucks most typical mistakes. He often uses the present form or past participle for the simple past tense, for example, see or seen for saw; his verbs frequently do not agree with their subjects in number and person; and he often shifts tense within the same sequence.(Janet Holmgren McKay, An Art So High: Style in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New Essays on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. by Louis J. Budd. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985) The Stigma of Nonstandard English We should not be so naive... as to begin thinking that nonstandard English will ever shed its stigma. Many who argue against teaching Standard conventions seem to believe it will. The reality is that failure to teach the conventions of Standard and formal Standard English in our classes is unlikely to have any effect on societys attitudes toward speakers of nonstandard English, but it will most certainly have an effect on our students lives. Their horizons will be limited, and many at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale will remain ghettoized. On this basis alone, I would argue that we must push students to reach their full potential, especially with regard to language. Our society is growing ever more competitive, not less, and Standard English, because it is inclusive rather than limiting, is a basic requirement for social and economic opportunities.(James D. Williams, The Teachers Grammar Book, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2005)