Guest Column: On writing better

By Brenda Looper

no less important here.

We don't do these jobs for our amusement (though it happens; we're a weird lot sometimes), but to serve readers and cast the writer in the best possible light. In that vein, some tips for writing from an editor: Be open to editing. No one's work is perfect, so if you send something to a newspaper with the directive not to edit it (or not to edit it without approval of every edit, which with short staffs is unlikely to happen), odds are it won't be printed. I can't think of any submission over the nearly 12 years I've been on the opinion side of things that didn't improve with editing, even something as simple as a comma in the right place. (Remember, commas save lives: Let's eat Grandma! OR Let's eat, Grandma!)

Read what you wrote, put it away, then don't look at it again for a minimum of six hours. If you don't have an editor friend and you're not on deadline, this trick helps you see what you wrote with an atleast-somewhat fresh set of eyes, which means you're likely to catch something that needs correcting. I typically write my column on Monday afternoon, then don't look at it again till after I've edited Rex Nelson's column the next day. I've been able to find some significant errors that way, as well as fine-tune some of the writing. Plus, at least one if not two other editors read through it as well. Sure, we'll still miss things occasionally, but that's life. Brush up on your grammar and word use. Editors don't expect a perfect piece to come to them, but something riddled with spelling errors (spellchecked or not; spellcheck typically doesn't catch correctly spelled words that are incorrect in usage), grammar errors such as wrong punctuation or misplaced modifiers (a misplaced modifier causes more trouble than a dangling participle) and odd spacing (spaces before punctuation, line breaks where they shouldn't be, etc.) tells the editor you don't really care. Clean up those issues before you submit something to give yourself a better chance of being published.

Kill your darlings. We all have them and should be willing to sacrifice them for the greater good. I'm a little too enamored of parentheticals (duh, but c'mon, they're fun and useful). But there are times when the reader gets to one of those darlings and says, "Oh, lord, not this again." Literary devices are very useful, but when writers lean on them too much, it makes it a slog to get through whatever they've written, and it all starts to sound the same. For example, use alliteration sparingly; I've been guilty of that, but it tends to be mostly in two- to three-word headlines. Whole paragraphs of it ... ugh, painful ... might remind the reader of Peter Piper and his peck of pickled peppers. Moderation goes a long way

Read your writing out loud. This would be the "sounds right" rule, and it's one I learned when I was studying broadcast news. If it sounds natural and flows smoothly as you're reading it, that's good; if something makes you stumble, it might need a rewrite.

Sort of like my life sometimes.

Originally published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on April 19, 2023. Reprinted with permission.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Assistant Editor Brenda Looper is editor of the Voices page. Email her at blooper@adgnewsroom. com. Read her blog at blooper0223. wordpress.com