Guest Blogger - R J Scott

I was searching for a subject to blog about and ended up clicking on a cool link that led to another wicked link which finally led me to another.

Improving my writing is an ongoing battle (as my editor will attest!) and when I stumbled on Edit Minion I had to smile. The site has a clever tool to analyse your writing in its most basic form. I remember using it when I first started to write and freaking the shite out of myself. I had so much red and purple on my screen that I couldn’t see the text underneath!

So you can see how it works I have taken the raw first page of The Only Easy Day, the sequel to Guarding Morgan and run it through the Edit Minion process. It wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting but the usual RJ Scott draft errors were there. Mostly passive voice that needs to be eradicated… because passive voice is WEAK!

For example: 'They were trapped and only close air support was going to solve this clusterfuck.'

'WAS GOING'! FFS… When am I going to learn!

Changing this sentence to: 'They were trapped. Only close air support would solve this clusterfuck' makes it a snappier sentence.

Or how about the sentence - 'Taken hostage by the Taliban, they were keeping him in a safe house in the mountains of Afghanistan.'

WERE KEEPING… WOOLY!

I will probably reword that to 'Taken hostage by the Taliban, he was imprisoned in a complex high in the Afghan mountains'

Who thinks that sounds better?

Anyway, Edit Minion can be found at: http://editminion.com/ it doesn’t have all the answers but it is a cool thing to play with.

COMPETITION

My website can be found at www.rjscott.co.uk. I am running a competition to win every single e-book I write in 2012 and that can be found here: http://rjscottauthor.blogspot.com/2012/01/2012-and-all-that-jazz-oh-yes-and.html

NOTE FROM LM - Clicking on the image "should" take you to a larger image at the photobucket account.  I am afraid blogspot shrinks it down a little.