Pneumonochrome

10. Perhaps the most obvious reason an editor is essnetial to the writing process is spelling. Correct spelling can make or brake your message. Few things are more distracting to large portions of the literate populous than abundant spelling errors.

9. An editor can help ensure that your sentences are consistent. It can be very confusing when your own on-the-go editing produces a sentence that seems to have been stapled together like the Frankenstein monster can cause your readers to reread portions of your sentences in complete befuddlemetn.

8. Editors help to make sure you stay focused in your writing. Focus is important, especially in topical writing. Topical writing is any writing that is done to discuss one specific topic and communicate information about it to many people. Much of the writing on teh internet could be considered attempts at topical writing. Some of my favorite blogs are topical blogs, whether they are about the daily experiences of people working under appreciated jobs or the latest political trends, each post on the blog generally should have a specific topic. I read one the other day about Hillary Clinton’s health care plan that was a prime example of good focus in writing. The post wasn’t long, really, but was packed with good information about and analysis of Senator Clinton’s proposed changes to the health care system in the United States. It was clear from the author’s writing that he didn’t care for Senator Clinton at all, but his treatment of her health care plan was very even. He resisted the urge to discuss other aspects of her platform in that post, which would have diminished the focus of the article and obfuscated the points he intended to make, and it made all the difference in the world to the readability of hte post.

7. Editors can help you to avoid one of the unpardonable sins of writing: excessive use of cliché. Everyone under the sun, these days, seems to plug cliché into their writing like it’s going out of style.

5. Editors, while good at helping you correct errors in your writing, can also identify areas where your writing is incomplete, helping you to be a more thorough and reputable writer.

4. Editros can also help to make sure you write using a grammar that is appropriate for your audience and purpose. Just as a technical manual should avoid words like “duh” and “fussbudget”, writing for young children should not be comprised of words like “esoteric”, “skullduggery”, or “actionable”.

3. What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before. For the rest of us, editors help to ensure we aren’t plagiarizing anyone else.

2. Editors can help spot punctuation errors that can be every bit as disracting as spelling errors can; and can help you find better sentence constructions in general.

1. Editors provide a much-needed second point-of-view. It will never make as much sense to anyone else as it does to you, and editors can help make sure you haven’t left out necessary antecedents.

I began reading “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” for my psychiatry class today. It is a novel narrated by a 15-year-old autistic boy named Christopher. I’m enjoying the book, which is enjoyable, insightful, and poignant all at once, and sometimes I come across a quote that is just awesome. Like the following:

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

There have been many, many times in my life where I have felt exactly this way. I get the feeling that everything that happen in my life makes sense on some level, but if I were to try to sit down and explain why it makes sense, I could never adequately do it. I think, perhaps, the same realization is at least partially behind expressions of inevitability, like the many so-called Murphy’s Laws.

I also think that when you get the opportunity to get inside Christopher’s mind in this book, you (or at least I) begin to realize that his way of experiencing the world is not completely foreign to you. There are aspects of his personality and thought process that I very much identify with, and though someone else may not identify with the same parts, I think most people probably identify with him at least a little bit.

Anyway, I’m enjoying the book, and I wanted to share that quote and my thoughts on it, now it’s time for me to hit my texts again.

So, we ordered our copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows online and didn’t get the guaranteed same-day shipping. So, unlike the rest of what seems like the world, I won’t be reading it until probably Wednesday. I’m considering using some of my vacation time to make sure that I get a chance to read it on that day, because I’m beginning to feel just a little impatient, now that the time is actually here.

edit:  Amazingly enough, it actually did come on Saturday.  I finished it Tuesday morning, however, because we didn’t realize it was sitting in the package box at our mailbox post, and didn’t pick it up until later.

So I finished this book, finally. I’m normally a pretty quick reader, but this was a book my wife and I were reading together. We both enjoyed it, but doing it this way slows us down a bit. My overall impression of the book is that it’s definitely a second-to-last book in the series, and a good one at that.

Jordan has spent most of his previous books creating this world where all the characters live, and creating many intertwined, conflicting plots. With all of this comes the need to create many, many characters to be involved in all of it. What results is one of the most complicated stories I’ve ever read. Jordan carries it off well, though, in all of his books. I’ve never felt so completely overwhelmed by the size of the world of the Wheel of Time that I stopped caring about one character, or a specific plotline. In truth, one of the most frustrating things about these books has been my desire to follow a plot through to the end when the book leaves it and goes to follow another. That happened in this book, just as it has in most of the other books in the series, but that’s a good frustration, it means I stayed engaged throughout the book.

Also typical of Jordan’s writing is the way the book progresses. It begins more slowly than it ends, building up the various plots it deals with over the course of about 80% of the book, and then in the last 20% of the book, he reaches the climax of the conflicts, resolves them, and moves on. One of the major differences in this area from Jordan’s other books is that I believe this book closes with fewer open plots than it began with, which hasn’t happened (to my recollection) since The Eye of the World. That was a bit refreshing, and is the major reason that I say it definitely reads like a second-to-last book. This book had the feel of tieing up plot lines that lead characters to where they must be before the last battle, and setting the stage for the great, final conflict. For anyone who hasn’t read it yet, I highly recommend doing so.

The only complaint I have about the books is that they’ve finally reached a level where there are so many characters that I know I’ll need to consult a character database or quickly re-read all of the books right before A Memory of Light is released. This isn’t a bad thing, really, it’s the natural result of writing as extensive as this series has been, and I wouldn’t ask for it to be different, really. It just gets a little overwhelming at times.

Now it’s time to get started on “The End” from A Series of Unfortunate Events

For those out there who are fans of the wheel of time series, and who haven’t noticed this yet: In a recent blog post Robert Jordan seems to have given a glimpse both to some of his plans for after his final WoT book, “A Memory of Light,” is completed and to who survives the end of that book.

Jordan has long kept open the idea that he may write some “outrigger” novels once the main WoT sequence is complete, if he feels the ideas are strong enough. In the above linked blog post he mentions his plans for, “finishing A Memory of Light, of course, and getting started on Mat and Tuon, and some others, five to ten years after the Last Battle.” This is a bit exciting for me, as Mat and Tuon have become a couple of my favorite characters. It would seem this mention of Matt and Tuon must be one of the “outrigger” novels he’s mentioned before, and if their lives, along with others (I’m crossing my fingers for Thom and Moirane; Nynaeve and Lan; Elayne, Aviendha and Min; and perhaps Egwene and Gawyn), are to be described five to ten years after the Last Battle, it would seem they have to survive it. Woo-hoo!