I recently read a book in which there are not one but two places in which one character is asked to explain something and the text, in the story, is essentially “and so I told them,” never providing the reader with the actual explanation.
My kneejerk reaction to the first occurrence was, yes, it sure is a lot easier to type “and so I told them” than to write the clever story that is allegedly being told. My subsequent thought at the second occurrence was that there would be an endnote saying, “To get the missing information, sign up for my newsletter!”
If you bought a jigsaw puzzle or an assembly-required chair and discovered halfway through that necessary parts had been purposely excluded and you were expected to jump through hoops to acquire them, you’d recognize that as a garbage product. If you bought a paper book and in the middle there was an order form instructing you to send a SASE to receive missing pages 201–212, you’d recognize that as a garbage product. You would not do business with the producers of those products a second time.
But for some reason, people have dismissed ebooks from the category of products that should be delivered whole. It’s normal if they’re incomplete and you have to jump through hoops to get the missing pieces! It’s unfair to judge the product you received as-is! The missing parts are available and it’s not the author or publisher’s fault you’re too lazy to put in the effort and be deluged by spam from them and everyone they sell your email to!
Hot take: Books should be whole. “Extras” should be optional. Books that exist only to harvest email addresses are a garbage product.
“But-but-but the writing police will throw me in jail if I don’t make numbers go up on my newsletter subscriber stats!”
“GET EVERYONE IN THE WORLD TO SIGN UP FOR YOUR NEWSLETTER!” is the brainchild of newsletter services you have to pay more as your list bloats.
You benefit only from people who enthusiastically click on the products you sell. People who sign up only to get free shit or enter sweepstakes and never bother to unsubscribe siphon money out of your pocket, and when they never open your emails and/or mark them as spam because their interest ended at the free shit, your sender reputation score takes a hit so any interested subscribers are less likely to receive your emails. (Below a certain reputation threshold, many email providers filter out mass mailings before they even hit the spam folder, and the intended recipient never sees a trace of it. Your newsletter service does not give you a discount for newsletters nobody ever receives.)
Unless you make more money selling the data than it costs you to maintain that bloated list, a list bloated with uninterested subscribers is bad business.
From a freelance editor’s blog:
There’s nothing inherently wrong with adverbs. They’re just part of a category of things I believe are lazy in writing.
Dearest, 2 of those 20 words written about adverbs being lazy writing are… adverbs.
Adverb phobia is a sentiment people parrot because they’ve been brainwashed to do so, not because they “believe” enough to practice what they preach—or even understand what they’re preaching. Pull the string; a tinny voice recites, “MODIFIERS BAD!”
This person did give a good example of improving a sentence by expanding the information initially conveyed via adverb. It’s a shame her entire premise was “adverbs are LAZY, use better verbs” rather than focusing on the virtues of that descriptive expansion (which, notably, did not involve altering the verb used in her “bad” example, contrary to the instructions provided).
Another hot take: If you’re blogging to market your editing services, every post should be a first-class example of your editing skills. If you can’t even recognize logical inconsistencies in your own 500-word message, how can you be trusted to track them through a novel?