Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words 6/8/2009

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Trust Your Reader

I written this many times while editing.

David B. Coe experienced it from the other end with his editor directing the words at him, and he defines the situation quite well in his 2009 posting, including some of the big red flags so you can self-edit those and provides possible solutions for the self-edit. The full post, Trusting Your Reader: The Writer and the Reader, Part I, is here:

Remember, don’t preempt your reader’s sense of discovery. Trust them to remember things which happened just three pages ago. Let them figure out the person is a jerk by the way they talk and act; you don’t need to reiterate it writing in the narrative “John thought privately James is a jerk, as did most people James met.”

Too Much Information is annoying when a person is reading. It takes all the magic away.