Be Your Own Editor: A Writer's Guide to Perfect Prose

by Sigrid Macdonald

Are you uncertain when to use affect or effect? Loath or loathe? Compliment or complement? Do you struggle with character development, establishing realistic dialogue and composing articles, proposals or manuscripts? Be Your Own Editor by Sigrid Macdonald offers a crash course in grammar basics, starting with punctuation and proper use of the dreaded apostrophe. It suggests ways to identify frequently misused words; to devise strong characters and background settings in fiction; and to structure nonfiction. Nowadays, we're all writers - we write blogs, essays and business proposals. Professional authors write short stories, newspaper articles and manuscripts. If your writing is good, but you question your grammar and organizational skills, this informative, reader-friendly manual is for you.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Reference

Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Originally from New Jersey, Sigrid Macdonald currently resides in Ottawa, Ontario. She has been a manuscript editor and freelance writer for a number of years. Her works have appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper; The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter; the American magazine, Justice Denied; The Toastmaster, a publication of Toastmasters International; and She Magazine. Her first book, Getting Hip: Recovery from a Total Hip Replacement, was published in 2004. Be Your Own Editor, a guide for writers and students of all ages and stages, followed in 2010.

Macdonald is a social activist with a special interest in the seemingly disparate issues of women's rights and wrongful convictions. She is a public speaker and a member of Ottawa
Independent Writers, the Editors' Association of Canada, the Center for Inquiry, the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted and Ottawa Skeptics.

Reviews

[Jae Jae]

Some helpful tips, but nothing new to me. Plus it had a couple of errors: incorrect advise on apostrophes (the Macdonald's home) and incorrectly recommends using a comma after every conjunction. The section on commas was confusing and sometimes incorrect.

[Katia M. Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know this was written in 2010, but there is some terrible advice in here such as, "Don't take the extra time to perfect your writing when you are off duty. It will make you neurotic..." I imagine the idea behind this is to stop people forgetting they have a real life, but in my opinion if writing is a big part of your real life, you should take every opportunity to improve.

This reads like a series of blog posts that have been stuck together to make a book. The author relies heavily on the Chicago Manual of Style and Grammar Girl, so it is American-centric. There is nothing wrong with Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty is a journalism professor at a university so she knows her stuff. But it felt like the author was simply rehashing material from these two sources.

I was also a little dubious about the idea of citing Wikipedia in essay writing. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I would never cite a publicly editable source in a piece of academic writing. The author would have us believe the 3.8 errors per article is comparable to the errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica so it is ok. I wouldn't cite an encyclopaedia for academic work either, even if it was the Britannica. I don't have an issue with people citing primary sources on the Internet or articles from something like JSTOR, but not something any Tom, Dick or Harry can amend.

I also disagree with the sentiment that it doesn't matter if you write badly in your every day writing such as messages to friends. The author says, "Who cares?" and "Use pig-Latin." I don't think so. In my opinion, if you want to write well, you should strive to do so all the time or risk reinforcing errors. The comment, "Your best effort will be good enough" is disheartening. What if your best effort is dreadful? What if you think this means you do not need your best effort edited?

I'm afraid I can't recommend this book, not only was some of the advice poor, but there were errors in it as well, particularly with the formatting. In this instance, the author's best effort was not good enough.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Chicago Manual of Style Lite. Best thing is the quizzes.

[abdiwahab Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is really good book for young writers in order be editors their mistakes and also stay from procrastination on writing.

[Hitesh Goenka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise and delivers what the title promises. For more anecdotes and insights into the world of self-editing, I need to read more books. This book is a decent starting point for new writers.

4/5

[Markus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read too many books on writing and don't write enough. The info here is good, though some punctuation and grammar stuff I haven't heard before and rather surprised me.

But most of the info is available from other sources as well. It's nice that this was offered as a free book somewhere online. That's where I got it. And good info at that price is nothing to complain about.

[Kayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't read all of it. I was interested in the fiction writing, but I felt like there was a lot of errors... There is great advice to read on writers block though. :)