Join me on Medium Day, August 12, at 3:30 central daylight time for even more cringeworthy tips to improve your writing — Is your writing filled with clichés? Are you making amateur errors (and don’t even know it)? Want to level up your writing? We editors are not the grammar police, but we sure can help you polish your writing. Readers are not forgiving. Do typos make you wince? …

Are trite phrases becoming the new punctuation for conversations? — When someone wished my US Marine Corps tough-as-nails father, “Have a nice day,” he either said under his breath or actually out loud, “How the fuck am I supposed to do that.” If you’re offended by swearing, stop reading now. Of course, the well-wishing phrase has become trite. A cliché…

Only if you want to write a commercial-quality nonfiction book — First-time authors often don’t know about the various sections of a book they need to write. …

Your Favorite Blunders Explained So You Won’t Write Like an Amateur — Shall we start with a little fun quiz? No Offense Taken What’s wrong with this list of names from a nonfiction business book: Bob, Mary, Harry, Bill, Susan, Janet, Kim, Donna, Frank, and Mike? I’ll wait. See the pattern? In your workplace, don’t you have coworkers with more ethnic first and last names…

Guess who wrote this post? Remember in high school when you could pay a smarty-pants nerd to write a paper for you? And you just hoped you wouldn’t get caught by the stickler who taught your English class? That was the 1960s. Remember in high school when you could buy a prewritten paper online. And…

Follow the Clues to Find Out What a Book Is About So You Won’t Waste Time and Money Did you ever buy a book and then discover it’s not what you thought? A memoir turned out to be a novel. Or an enticing cover misguided you into thinking the book was literary fiction and it was memoir? Bummer. We readers know what we like to read, and when…

Hacks for Writing Authentic Dialogue — What did Jennifer Lopez say to Ben at the Grammy's? The body language would tell you it wasn’t a love message. How about Mitt Romney’s remarks to George Santos during the State of the Union gathering? Something nasty, and Santos spit it right back. We couldn’t hear these exchanges or…

Confessions from a Book Award Judge — Yes, you can judge a book by its cover. I do. I am a book award judge. As a judge, I am sent a box of books, all entries in one category for a major book award. Sometimes two boxes of books. …

The Essential Publishing Question All First-Time Authors Ask — Ask not what your editor can do for you. Well, actually, that’s the question you do want to ask when you’re writing your book, feeling overwhelmed or stark naked actually about the whole writing and publishing process. But wait, you say, I need to find an editor. I’m a first-time…