Don't Let Your Editor Give Your Book A Bad Break

This is a tip directly from my SharingwithWriters newsletter. I often share tips from my The Frugal Editor in it--or expand on tips in the book. Or sometimes even update them. To subscribe go to my HowToDoItFrugally Web site and find the subscription link in the upper right corner of most pages.  Do remember that when authors know a lot about editing themselves, the fewer chances a publisher's editor will have of giving their book a "bad break."

Editing Tip:  Avoid what editors call bad breaks. Here are some examples:

~They can be widows (where the last line of a paragraph appears all by its little lonely self on the next page).

~They can be orphans (where a paragraph, title, subhead, title or section begins on one page and gets left dangling there with only one line until the reader gets to the next page).

~A bad break can be a hyphenated word at the end of line that appears as the very last thing a reader sees on any given page.

~A bad break can be a word that breaks incorrectly at the end of a line. Check your dictionary when you must break a word. Dictionaries tell you here syllable breaks are and we don’t break words anywhere but between syllables. We also don’t usually break a long word after the very first syllable or before the last one.

~We also don’t break a name (use a hyphen) after an initials in a name. So, we should leave a name like “J. R. Turner” on one line with attempt to break it even if avoiding the break screws with the spacing a tad.

Don’t forget you’ll find many, many other tips on “Avoiding Humiliation and Ensuring Success” for your book in The Frugal Editor (http://budurl.com/TheFrugalEditor)

CHJ

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson edits, consults. and speaks on issues of publishing. Find her The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success (How To Do It Frugally series of book for writers). Learn more about her other authors' aids at www.howtodoitfrugally.com/writers_books.htm , where writers will find lists and other helps including Great Little Last-Minute Editing Tips on the Resources for Writers page. She blogs on all things publishing (not just editing!) at her Sharing with Writers blog. She tweets writers' resources at www.twitter.com/frugalbookpromo . Please tweet this post to your followers. We all need a little help with editing. (-:

Q&A A La Ann Landers: So OK. About Those Em Dashes!

I've been updating the formatting of my newsletter. Yep, that kind of thing is editing, too. This letter started out with a comment on the change of font from Arial to Verdana but then up came that hyphen/en dash/em dash thing. There is a full section on using and formatting these pesky guys in The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. Hope you'll use this occasion to learn more about them.

Question:

Carolyn:

I LOVE Verdana - I do all my writing in it, as it is tremendously easy on
the eyes...on the computer screen. I personally HATE Times New Roman - very
difficult to find errors because of the typeface. But, I always convert to
Times New Roman before I send out a query letter, submission, etc. because
of its popularity with the publishing community.

So, keep up the good work. BTW, what is with all the spaces before and after
a hyphen? Even e-mail showed up as e - mail.-----Katie Hines, Freelance Writer & Children’s Author.

Answer:

Thank you for your input, Katie. Love it. Yes, as I suggest in the Frugal Editor, better to go with tradition when we're trying to get our work past a gatekeeper! In other cases we get to break rules and maybe, in the process, make some new ones that are better. Glad you love Verdana. I almost settled on Calibri which I like, too, but decided to go with Annette Fix's (author of the Break-Up Diet) recommendation.

As for the hyphens. I checked and my Word copy shows no spaces on either side of the hyphen in the word e-mail or others. So can't tell you what is up with that! Maybe something to do with line breaks or servers. Geesht. who knows?

As for em dashes (those longer dashes we use between ideas and such), I do use spaces on either side of them. This is a style choice for online reading (It is not a rule, but it is often done and sometimes advised). It is never, never done in books or other print, though. I used the spaces before when I was using Arial font but maybe they aren't needed with Verdana. Maybe the wider-spaced Verdana design makes them, mmmmm...obsolete. Thank you! I'll try them without.

(You can subscribe to my weekly newsletter by sending me an e-mail at hojonews@aol.com. Put "Subscribe" in the subject line.)


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Carolyn Howard-Johnson edits, consults and speaks on issues of publishing. Find her The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0978515870. Learn more about her other authors' aids at www.howtodoitfrugally.com. She blogs on all things publishing (not just editing!) at www.sharingwithwriters.blogspot.com.