tailieunhanh - Mastering the craft of science writing part 14

Tham khảo tài liệu 'mastering the craft of science writing part 14', ngoại ngữ, kỹ năng viết tiếng anh phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | This page intentionally left blank Refining Your Draft The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. Poul Anderson Refining your draft is much like editing someone else s work except that you always have the writer handy maybe too handy as the inner writer tends to defend the status quo. Oh but that image is so funny. An editor by definition has one enormous advantage that the writer does not a fresh eye. Not knowing what the manuscript is supposed to say the editor can tell what it does say the better to spot any gaps and goofs. Editing your own work is hard primarily because you lack that outsider s view. You can approximate it however. Don t you find that you can often tell how something might look to someone else Now is the time to call on that social ability. Before you start refining do whatever will freshen your view of the manuscript. At a minimum take a break and print out the manuscript. Because I revise extensively I write and print my manuscripts in galley format which you may care to try single-spaced at some forty-two to sixty characters per line never more. Forty-two is a traditional line count for newspapers because that s about how many characters the human mind can process at one time. As a result forty-two is highly readable. A newspaper reader runs his eye right down the middle of the column with no significant left-to-right movement therefore no chance of losing his place. Readability is still good at sixty characters a width that offers the writer one extra advantage It puts more text on each page so that you see every word and sentence in its full context. Either width gives you plenty of room to write reactions and can scrawl whole new paragraphs if you like. Give thought as well to your typeface because if your Ideas into Words text is physically hard to read you re working under a handicap. Research demonstrated years ago that serif typefaces the ones with high-rising l s and h s and with little cross .