Editorial Notes = clarifying information, additional insight, annotations

Hiya Reader,

Until this year, I hadn't attended a wedding in so long my adult kids were actual kids, not just my kids. I'm on my way to the fourth one this weekend! It's not the generational, either, as this particular wedding is one of people in their late 50's who have never before been married. How fun is that! Like writers on submission, our friends played the long game here.

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Example of the Week

Sometimes this is a good example—or a great one. Sometimes this is a bad example—or just a funny blooper. Sometimes a combination. You never know.

Too long for a caption, but here is the full text for screen readers:

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his English class one day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative." A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

Actionable Tip of the Week

A trick to add to your self-editing toolbox right now!

​The Pudding ran 200,000 "as ___ as ___" similes through an analysis, and the takeaway is clear: "as dry as" goes to bone, desert, and dust 43% of the time.

Put differently, when you grab a simile on autopilot, the first ones you come to are most likely one of the same ones everyone else would use.

Put even more bluntly, your intended comparison is often a cliché and therefore worse than no comparison at all.

Some nouns are specialists. For example, "cool as a cucumber" is so locked in that two random instances of "as ___ as a cucumber" match each other 92% of the time.

Other nouns appear way more than they should. "Hell" cracks the top-10 comparison for 17 different adjectives, despite having nothing to do with most of them, making this word just a stand in for "very."

To borrow Whitman, it's not just people who contain multitudes. So do cats. They top the charts for nervous, active, agile, and nimble all at once. Take that, you pigeonholed stubborn mules forever!

The real gift for writers in both creation and revision is the data on what not to write — the clichés are now literally chartable.

When checking your descriptions, choose the long tail, not the spike. Or better, steal the move the piece flags at the end: the ironic simile, where you invert the expected quality for a laugh, i.e. "as clear as mud," or "happy as a dad at a Taylor Swift concert."

Reader Question of the Week

Helen wrote: Why are manuscripts still expected to be double spaced instead of single or even space and a half?

Helen! Double spacing became standard in the days of typewriters, mainly so editors had room to work. When someone's marking up your manuscript by hand they need blank space between the lines to actually write on. Single or even 1.5 spacing just doesn't leave enough room to do that legibly. It also made manuscripts easier to read closely because that extra vertical space cuts down on eye strain and makes it easier to keep your place, especially across a long document.

There's a practical bonus too: with a standard font like Times New Roman at 12pt, double-spaced pages work out to a predictable word count, roughly 250 words per page. That let agents and editors eyeball a manuscript's length without counting every word, which mattered a lot before word processors could do it instantly.

So while it started as a solution to a physical problem, the convention has stuck. It's become the expected format, so submitting double-spaced signals you know industry standards, even though the original reason doesn't much matter anymore.

Want to Submit a Reader Question to Helene?

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Link of the Week

An interesting read on how to ask better questions and get better answers. Try them the next time you are interviewing someone for a reported piece, or interrogating your characters.

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Thanks for reading!

~Helene, your writing sherpa