No "proper grammar"

In my experience, a lot of writers focus only on the creative side at the expense of the mechanical side. And by “mechanical,” I don’t mean “proper grammar” — I mean effective communication and effective sentences.

[…]

A lot of people have wonderful ideas, wonderful stories, wonderful things to say, wonderful messages to communicate. [But] their sentences come out clunky and awkward in a way that the reader loses their attention.

That was quote #1. Here are four more (from my guest, June Casagrande)

The specificity of your nouns also has a psychological effect on your reader that some novice writers don’t get and miss out on.

Ask yourself: What’s your subject? Is it the most interesting subject it can be?

You asked what things I find a lot of writers do wrong. [These things] fall under the umbrella of “being too in their own heads and not in the reader’s shoes.”

In a tiny book, you don’t want to waste words anyway, right? And so you want to word things as efficiently as possible. Not just for space reasons, but for reasons of doing the best job you can for your reader, helping them best get at what you’re saying.

I discovered June Casagrande through her books:

• The Best Punctuation Book, Period (Random House)

• It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer’s Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences (Random House)

June is an American author, columnist, journalist, copy editor, and copyediting instructor.

You can watch the interview on YouTube, or you can listen to the podcast here.

Have a great weekend!

Talk soon,

Fabio