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    Precise Edit Training Manual
    Precise Edit Training Manual
    Precise Edit Training Manual
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    Precise Edit Training Manual

    By David Bowman

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    About this ebook

    Comprehensive instruction on the 29 most common editing strategies we use and errors we fix. Each topic is fully explained with examples and strategies for editing and writing. This is the writing guide our editors use. Learn to write and edit like a professional.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Bowman
    Release dateJul 15, 2010
    Precise Edit Training Manual
    Author

    David Bowman

    Born in 1956 in the East Anglian Fens in England, David moved to Nottingham to study for his business degree. In line with the current myth of the time, he met and married a local girl, and they have now been married for 44 years. They still live within 10 miles of Nottingham and have two adult children, and have happily become grandparents five times over. Following a career in software development and IT management, David was forced to give up work in 2005 to look after both his wife and daughter, both of whom were suffering from different life-threatening illnesses. To fill the time and take his mind off of the domestic and financial issues, David eventually turned to his love of both photography and writing. Seven Sisters was the first product of the latter and has been followed by a prodigious number of works.

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    • 5/5
      One of the best book about editing. Concise. Containing well-chosen examples from other texts and examples demonstrated with the author's own writing. It shows the author truly mastered the strategies before telling the readers.

    Book preview

    Precise Edit Training Manual - David Bowman

    The 29 most common strategies we use and problems we fix

    Precise Edit

    Training Manual

    Practical Writing and Editing

    for Practical People

    Precise Edit Training Manual

    © 2009, David Bowman

    All rights reserved. No part of this document may be copied, sold, or distributed,

    in either printed or electronic format, without the written permission of David Bowman.

    For more information, contact dbowman@PreciseEdit.com.

    http://PreciseEdit.com

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Table of Contents

    Writing Well (Editing)

    Keeping It Simple: The Subject-Verb-Object Structure

    Where Is There? (Starting sentences with there)

    When Verbs Go Bad (Nominalizations)

    Adverbial Pollution

    It Is What It Is (Starting sentences with it)

    It’s not you. It’s me. (Using you inappropriately)

    Obama Is Selling Drugs? (Placing phrases correctly)

    The Power of Three

    10 Words to Avoid

    Don’t Hedge

    Writing Effective Paragraphs

    Pacing Information for Understanding and Impact

    Writing Effective Essays-Organizing Whole Papers

    Guns, Bullets, and Bang: Combining Impact Strategies

    Facts versus Opinions

    Writing Correctly (Mechanics)

    11 Common Usage Errors

    That vs. Which

    Effect vs. Affect

    Who vs. Whom

    Lay and Lie

    Aligning the Pieces

    Sentence Fragments with Conjunctions

    Correct Comma Usage: Three Pesky Errors

    Not Only Pesky But Also Annoying

    End Apostrophe Abuse

    Sexist Language and Bad Grammar

    Ending Sentences with Prepositions

    Everyone Is Single

    One Last Piece of Advice

    Marketing Questions to Improve Your Writing

    Keeping It Simple: The Subject-Verb-Object Structure

    Clear writing, direct writing, simple writing, economical writing, easy-to-understand writing. All these phrases mean the same thing, and they have one purpose—Help the reader to understand what you are writing. Their opposites are fuzzy writing, confusing writing, cumbersome writing, complicated writing, and hard-to-understand writing.

    How do we produce the first type of writing and avoid the second? This is the question that many writers have asked. They ask this question because they care whether or not their readers understand them. Most people who hire editors are seeking help with this exact problem.

    At Precise Edit, we have a powerful, yet simple, strategy for producing clear writing that is superior to all other strategies: use the Subject-Verb-Object sentence structure.

    1. Identifying the Subject, Verb, and Object

    First, let's define our terms. Then we will examine how this strategy works.

    Subjects: The subject of the sentence is the doer of the main action. Subjects come in two flavors. The grammatical subject is the word in the subject's place in a sentence. The rhetorical subject is the person, place, thing, or idea that the sentence is about. This distinction is critical to producing clear writing. Let's take a look at an example to see how the grammatical subject differs from the rhetorical subject.

    A major element of the strategy is simplifying that which is difficult.

    In this example, element is the grammatical subject. This word is in the subject's place in the sentence, followed by the verb is. However, we ask the question, What is this sentence actually about? The answer is simplifying. Therefore, the rhetorical subject is simplifying.

    You may have noticed that this sentence does, indeed, follow the Subject-Verb-Object structure. The problem with this sentence, however, is that the grammatical subject and the rhetorical subject are not the same. We want only one subject, i.e., the grammatical subject and the rhetorical subject should be the same. When we put the rhetorical subject in the place of the grammatical subject, we get,

    Simplifying the difficult is a major element of the strategy.

    Verbs: A sentence may have several verbs. The verb in the verb's place following the subject is generally the main verb upon which the rest of the sentence hangs. The main action in a sentence is called the rhetorical action. The main verb and the rhetorical action may not be the same. Generally, when we are trying to identify the rhetorical subject, we first have to identify the rhetorical action.

    Objects: The object of a sentence is the recipient of the action or the person, place, thing, or idea upon which the rhetorical subject acts. Not all sentences have an object.

    Let's look at an example and identify these parts.

    John sent a bouquet of flowers to Mary to surprise her on her birthday.

    Verbs: This example has two verbs, send and surprise, but the rhetorical action is sent. In this sentence, sent is both the grammatical verb and the rhetorical action.

    Subject: The doer of the rhetorical action is John, so John is the rhetorical subject. In this case, John is also the grammatical subject.

    Object: What did John send? The action is performed on bouquet, so bouquet is the object. Everything else in this sentence provides additional description or elaboration upon the basic idea of the sentence: John sent a bouquet.

    Here, we can easily see that this sentence uses the subject-verb-object structure.

    (For those who REALLY like grammar, notice that the direct object, bouquet of flowers, is placed before the prepositional phrase to Mary instead of using the indirect object Mary. If we use the indirect object, the sentence will read, John sent Mary a bouquet of flowers to surprise her on her birthday. By using the indirect object, the simple form of the sentence seems to be John sent Mary. This may momentarily confuse the reader until he reads the rest of the sentence and figures out that John did not send Mary somewhere but sent something to Mary.)

    2. Using S + V + O to Simplify Complex Sentences

    Our formula for clear sentences is S + V + O, but, actually, the expanded version of this structure is Rhetorical Subject + Rhetorical Action + Object. When a sentence follows this structure, complex ideas can be presented clearly and simply. Also, based on the above concepts, the grammatical subject should be the rhetorical subject, and the main verb should be the rhetorical action.

    Let's examine a sentence that does not follow these guidelines and then see how applying these concepts help clarify the sentence.

    Avoiding ambiguity is a task that many writers find hard to accomplish.

    This poor sentence has the following elements:

    Grammatical subject: Avoiding ambiguity

    Rhetorical subject: writers

    Main verb: is

    Rhetorical action: find

    Object: none, though the phrase that many writers find hard to accomplish is in the object position. However, the object of the rhetorical action is Avoiding ambiguity, which is currently in the subject position. (What

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