Julie Earhart's Visit

From MyTracs

Julie Earhart -- author, publisher, and teacher -- visited the MyTRACs interns Saturday February 16, 2008. She presented a workshop about peer editing.

Julie giving us editing tips to make our writings better.

Julie's tips:

1. Our first draft should never be our final draft—assume first drafts are bad.
2. Write tight – take out unnecessary words (her examples were very, really, just, actually, like, and anything that ends with "up").
3. Minimize preposition phrases – All of my cousins becomes All my cousins.
4. Always put comma after city AND state and day AND year – (Her example: We traveled to Chicago, Illinois, on July 4, 2008, for fun).
5. Never start a paper with a question that can be answered Yes or No because if the answer is no, you've already lost your reader.
6. You should be able to summarize your paper in 6-10 words.
7. Remember the ‘s’ for subject/verb agreement (Her example One bird sings -- Three birds sing).
8. The words each, each one, either, neither, everyone, everybody, anybody, anyone, nobody, somebody, someone, and no one are singular and require a singular verb.
9. The words both, many, few, and several are plural and require a plural verb.
10. Put an apostrophe in ‘40s (decade) but not when written out 1940s.
11. Every sentence starts will a capital letter.

Julie gave us two books to help with editing. We will use them, along with her tips, to write (and edit) our MyTRACS discussion and recommendation pages.