Katie Swanson's List: Favorites

• Creating a “mission statement”
• Have reason and focus when writing.
• Thinking about brevity when writing briefly
• Research has shown that readers flip through Web pages faster than printed ones, which means writers have less time than ever to make a good impression online.
• Using active verbs
• Avoiding redundancies
• There’s really no reason to say the same thing more than once in writing.
• Trimming fat
• Use adjectives sparingly, limit adverbs to those times when it’s absolutely necessary to alter the verb’s definition, and make sure prepositions are always in their place, which is very close to, if not next to, the object they’re supposed to modify.
• Doing the math
• Paying attention to personal quirks
• Pacing yourself
• taking care to prepare for a writing or editing project can eliminate scheduling and organizational obstacles that slow us down. With careful preparation comes time to think clearly and carefully about what we’re writing, and given adequate time we can pace our production.
• Editing more than once
• edit a piece at least three times taking three approaches: first, editing for story structure and clarity; second, for spelling; and third, for grammar.

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