Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
Do I get letters? Yes. I get letters. Dear Mr. Editor Person: Often I read words or phrases that make my grammatical hair stand on end, my syntactical stomach churn, and my semantical head bow in grief. Someone uses “impact” as if it were a verb or “ask” as if it were a noun, and …
The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz practiced the scales every day, even in his eighties. He wanted to continually master his craft so that he would be “be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.” The same is true for us. Here are two skills you can master. Don’t worry about …
Benjamin Dreyer is the Stephen Colbert of grammar, style, and punctuation—informative while always being cheerfully acerbic. When he tells us in Dreyer’s English to never use actually, it is “because, seriously, it serves no purpose I can think of except to irritate.” When offering examples, Dreyer also gives us cause to smile. Honorary titles should …
When people hand me a proposal or manuscript for a non-fiction book and ask me for a publishing opinion, we’ll talk about a number of issues. But I have one chief diagnostic question. Almost anything and everything an author has to say flows from the answer to this question. It tells writers what kind of …
What will publishing be like in fifty years? Will we be reading books from our brain implants? Will people still love print books but be printing and binding them in their home or office? Will reading increase because people will have more time as they travel in self-piloted personal drones?
Bill was thinking about a mid-life career switch and wondered if publishing might be the right thing for him. He knew conventional wisdom says that you should move into expanding industries. But since he likes books and ideas, editing came to mind. So we talked.
When I was young, a movie was based on a novel, a lecture was based on research and a joke was based on current events. But now movies are based off novels, lectures are based off research and jokes are based off current events.
Charlie Hummel was president of Barrington College for ten years, director of faculty ministry for InterVarsity for another fourteen years and the author of several IVP books. While his most famous IVP title is Tyranny of the Urgent which has sold over a million copies, he also wrote several larger tomes including Fire in the …
With short attention spans growing shorter due to so many distractions from iPhones, social media and our own to-do lists, how do writers keep readers with them all the way to the end?
When I was new to the editing game, just a green, wide-eyed youth, my already grizzled boss, Jim Sire, told me, “When editing something, you can almost always improve it by throwing away the first three paragraphs.” It’s a bit of wisdom I’ve carried with me and applied many times for over thirty-five years.