Many aspiring authors think they can’t afford to hire an editor. If your plan is to publish, then the truth is you can’t afford NOT to hire one. Anyone can call themselves an “editor,” yet not all editors are the same. There is no test or certification process. Be choosy when you hire one. Instead of looking for the cheapest rate, look for editors with experience and a proven track record and figure out how you can reduce your costs by doing as much self-editing as possible. While inexpensive, the retired English teacher down the street is not a professional editor. Proofreaders are not editors. They check for typographical errors, missing words, formatting glitches. You will want to use a proofreader, but only when you have “proofs” ready to go to press. After you have a contract. After your publisher has approved your final version. After it’s gone to typesetting and layout. Don’t waste your money on a proofreader on your early drafts unless you’re too lazy to learn grammar, spelling, and punctuation. And if you haven’t mastered the mechanics of the English language, then perhaps you have some work to do before your writing will be published. Imagine if Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers had hired someone to run laps, practice yoga, and do push-ups for him. I mean, all that really matters is if the quarterback knows the right call to play, right? If you want to play in the big leagues, then you need you…

Passive voice weakens your writing. It obscures responsibility for action. Those who learn English as a second language struggle to make sense of the many ways in which Americans use passive verb constructions in everyday speech. It often finds its way into our writing. Rarely is the writer conscious of this problem in their writing. Passive voice is used by victims. Instead of actors, they are acted upon. Let me help you understand passive voice and how you can get rid of it in your writing. “The boy was hit by the bus.” Passive. The boy is the subject of this sentence. He is the passive recipient of action. The responsible party for the vehicular accident ends up an object in the sentence instead of an actor. The focus is on the victim, not on who or what caused the crash. Who did what to whom? “The bus hit the boy.” Active voice. Notice the different grammatical sentence structure. Subject-verb-object. The subject is the bus. The bus acts upon the direct object, the boy. The readers’ sympathies still lie with the boy; often intended by the writer of a passively constructed sentence. The action and agency, however, are front and center. The reader can see the bus crash into a boy more easily with the active verb of “hit.” Responsibility for the action is clear. See if you can change these 10 sentences into active voice. The transcript was stamped with a seal of approval by the registrar. Grant recipients…

As an editor I see one four letter word overused and abused more than any other. T. H. A. T. That. Many times it serves no grammatical purpose whatsoever. It is a filler word. You use it in conversation to signal to others a pause, like a verbal comma, to give the impression to a listener you haven’t finished speaking.  In writing, however, it is often an extraneous word. That adds no value to a sentence. Other filler words include: so, like, um, just, really, very, then, basically, totally. That, however, takes the top of the list for frequency. If you aren’t sure you need a “that,” cut it and see if the meaning suffers. If it doesn’t, you’re better off without that. Your prose will be much crisper and clearer without the filler word. There are instances when that serves a function. It can be a pronoun (that’s a good idea), a determiner (that guy over there), or an adverb (not that far). It can also be used as a conjunction for subordinate clauses. More about this last function in a moment. When it functions as a pronoun, that is used to identify a specific thing previously mentioned. The emphasis here needs to be placed on the fact that it identifies an inanimate object and not a person. This error is the most frequent one I see. Frank Bruni of the New York Times wrote a column in April of this year bemoaning the use of that instead of…