When you make an effort to use strongly evocative words in your narrative you are not just creating a richly textured piece of writing, you are also stimulating the brains of your readers. We were interested to read in the March 17th New York Times that neuroscientists are finding that reading not only activates the […]

Here in Washington D.C. the cherry blossoms are expected to hit peak bloom this week, about two weeks earlier than the average. This is to say spring has arrived here. We have had a stretch of unusually warm weather; the trees are greening up fast; and the bulbs have popped. All of this makes it […]

Writers sometimes use lists to bring a person or place to life through a sheer abundance of detail. When they work, lists are a groundswell of images that lift and transport the reader. Below is an example from an essay in John Updike’s memoir, SELF CONSCIOUSNESS (1989): A few housefronts farther on, what had been […]

Most of the books we edit are shorter when we are finished with them than they were when we started. Cutting out extraneous words and sentences is by no means all we do, but it is almost always a part of it. Something we always try to cut is redundancy. This crops up more than […]