Yeah, layout discussions early one are always…interesting. We just had one on Fate Core pointing out that we need some constructions in order to promote different text flows. We’ve got the task of trying to imagine the rendered page, while not being the person who will render said page. (Which has turned into some short conversations with Fred Hicks about making sure we can do some layout bits in Core.)

- Ryan

Don’t be afraid to ask your writer questions. These could be about layout, structure, etc.

1. You’re side-by-side, not on a pedestal. The editor-writer relationship is at its heart a partnership, with multiple people working at the same goal – getting the manuscript published. Writers are conditioned/scared into thinking editors are obstacles, and that the process is going to be difficult, but really, people are just working together (I wish I learned this earlier)

2. How you explain is as critical as what you explain. When I edit something, I might write “Crunchier here please” and while that makes sense to me in my head (I’m asking for some more substantial description and variation in word choice….either evocatively or dynamically), it’s my ability to explain that to the writer (both what ‘crunchy’ means and what context-specifically that looks like) that will get those desired changes to the page. I can say “Be crunchier” all I want, but until I give better detail myself, I can’t expect it to be there.

3. There’s no “right number” of edits per page. Okay, that’s sort of not true, because over time you learn that every writer has a style and that style lends itself to a routine of things to work on, but every manuscript is different, and sometimes you just take out the commas and some adverbs, and other times you’re chopping out half the chapter because it doesn’t move the story along. Don’t tea-total (tee-total? I never know), always serve the manuscript’s interests.

4. You’re an amplifier and a clarifier, not the writer. If you come across a particularly messy, poorly written or flat out I-don’t-like-this manuscript, the temptation is to do it yourself, because after all, you’re the editor and you have the ability to change stuff, right? But you’re EDITING, not writing. It’s one thing to rewrite a sentence or two so that the point comes across, it’s another entirely different thing to write something else in its place. Your job is take what’s there (either the ideas, the exact text or the text buried and needing excavation) and bring it into its best state. You would do it totally differently? Then write your own.

I’m sure I’ll have more….

Appreciate the quick reply. I’ll look forward to the next Rülsleit project.

Regards, Kem

Unfortunately, there’s not. :/ The moment we take money saying we’re going to do something, it’s important that we hold to that promise; we brake that trust, and we’re telling people to not trust us in the future.

In the future, I’m not going to push for exclusive content. That puts extra work on me without as much payoff as other ideas, and it causes this situation right here. I’d rather do sneak peeks/first access, cheaper/bundled, or things like that than cut off access entirely.

I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do for you. :( I can say that Josh & I are planning other stuff for Rülsleit, but that doesn’t help you right now.

- Ryan

It’s a shame to see a great game idea and system vanish for lack of distribution; having only half of a rules set is frustrating. Is there any way to get your content out without breaking your deal with the backers or inflicting a lot of additional work on its creators?

Thanks; Kem

Fair enough. Glad the content was useful.

*sigh* If you have to ask, then you’re choosing to play a status game rather than be friendly with your information. But since you have some good stuff here, I’m accepting the comment. Normally I kill troll comments with a quickness.

That said, the tool is still useful it pointing out places where a sentence could use a second glance.

- Ryan

(If this is basically unwelcome, just tell me to piss off and I’ll drop it, btw.)

This list of words doesn’t have much to do with the passive voice. It’s just a list of auxiliaries (“helping verbs”):

BE: am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been
HAVE: has, had, have

Some of these helping verbs are modals:
may/might, can/could, shall/should, will/would, must

Words can’t be passive voice — the passive voice is a construction made by combining a form of the verb BE with the past participle form of a lexical verb. A minimum of two words are required to construct a passive.

So this list of verbs may sound like “tofu,” but there’s nothing passive about them in a grammatical sense. From this list, only the forms of BE are even necessary to construct a passive voice clause, and not every instance of BE in discourse is used in a passive construction. Indeed, most of the time, BE is used for other reasons. The modal verbs have nothing to do with the passive voice at all. They signal different levels of obligation, permission, probability, possibility, etc., which maybe sounds weak (?) in some contexts, but is not related to the grammatical passive.

There are some verbs that are usually found in the passive (the blog English, Jack has a list here), but they’re a bit of a different animal — those verbs would often sound weird if you didn’t use the passive with them, so they’re probably not what you’re worried about here.

- Ryan

Now I’m pondering the psychological state involved when constructing such a sentence. But that’s (a) well outside my knowledge of psychology and (b) well outside the scope here.

- Ryan

I think it’d be really great if there were some discussion of the difference between “subject” and “agent”, and how the passive voice relates to changing the typical relationship between those two roles. I think that might help people a lot with passive voice recognition. But then again, I’m thinking about freshman linguistics papers, so.

You know, could also change the highlight color partway through the macro, so that different sorts of words had different highlighting.

Now I’m thinking.

- Ryan

Yeah. There are places where it’s useful and the right tool, but that should be the intent rather than accident. (Whether the intent with writing or the intent with revising and leaving it.) Accidental passive voice that would read better otherwise should be revised, just as anything that was hastily written in order to just get it done should be revised.

It confuses new writers because of how some teachers teach past & past perfect tense, and the focus in the passive voice crusade of the verb form rather than where the subject is. Etc. etc.

I will say that I left quite a bit highlighted in the document, and a good amount that I did chance wasn’t passive voice, but just repeated words or other crappy construction that needed to be cleaned up.

- Ryan

One thing that we-as-linguists see a lot is misplaced, poorly-understood and poorly-executed vilification of and crusades against passive voice. The number of times I’ve heard someone give an example of “passive voice” that was utterly wrong and not an example of it at all, in the midst of a rant against it—let me tell you! And the number of times I’ve heard people exhort writers to never use it. It’s infuriating in the same way that pop-psychology bothers psychological professionals—it’s like seeing your tools misused in inexpert hands.

But this, this is the right thing. Describing it as tofu-y is just right. It’s not that the passive voice is somehow wrong, it’s just stylistically usually the wrong choice. Love it.

http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/