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- Category
- Description/Setting
- Voice
- Critique
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- TRIMPROSEVANDERHOOFT
Verbose descriptions, redundancies, and other forms of overwriting can bog down a good story and be the difference between a good book and a truly excellent one. Freelance editor JoSelle Vanderhooft will teach you secrets for line editing that will help you shorten sentences, get rid of repetition, learn the difference between a wordy sentence and a long sentence, and more.
- Syllabus
- Week one: We’ll define overwriting and look at verbosity, which I think go hand-in-hand. I’ll have participants rewrite/edit 10–15 short passages (no more than a paragraph) to get rid of redundancies and explain their work. We’ll also take a look at overwriting in their own work.
Week two: We’ll look at overwriting in the sense of bogging down narration with two much detail. The homework will be the same idea as the one above: they’ll go through some short passages and rewrite them, and we’ll also look at any issues they may be having in their own work.
Week three: We’ll look at redundancy, both in word choice and in repeating details (e.g. Todd being Michael’s brother is mentioned on p. 3, p. 16, and p. 32 when it only needs to be mentioned on p. 3). and the few cases when repeat info may be helpful (Todd is an important character and is mentioned once on page 3 and then appears for the first time on p. 116, so people may have forgotten who he is by then). Similar exercises as in week one and two.
Week four: We’ll look at stating the obvious and how this is overwriting. (e.g. Gretchen and Todd just broke up and Gretchen is sobbing, so the author need not also tell us that Gretchen is upset.)
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