One bane of every writer, including this one, is watching how you start sentences, particularly in first person. I don’t mean sentence fragments. A newer editor and writer complained about that, to which I said, “I not only use them all the time, I once edited a book written almost entirely in fragments.” He was horrified, but the book, a two-week copy edit, would have taken more like six weeks or had to have gone back to the author for another trip across the keyboard. But there is one error I flag because, as a writer, I know it’s invisible during the creation process but will drive readers batty.

That opening word on every sentence in a given paragraph. I mentioned first person up front because it’s also the hardest to avoid, hardest to edit, and hardest for the writer to fix if it goes beyond the limits of a copy edit. Unless we’re in a developmental edit, where we’re already killing darlings and moving scenes around, I don’t rewrite. That’s not my job. My job is to flag where the prose needs tightened up. Even in a developmental edit, I’d flag a troublesome paragraph with a comment. (Thank you, Word. Thank you, Scrivener. Thank you, Google Docs.)  In first person, it’s hard not to start every sentence with “I.”

“I” is the most common word in a first-person narrative. The narrator is telling you a story, and the narrator, more often than not, is the protagonist–or thinks they are. So, you can have two or three paragraphs where the narrator starts every single sentence with “I.” Also in first person, it’s the hardest to fix. If it’s too onerous, I highlight and comment that it needs reworded. I can just see the writer cringing as they read that note. I can also hear them going “D’oh!” As a writer, I can relate.

But “I” is not the only offending word. “You” (usually in dialog), “he/she/they,” and, to my surprise, “the” are frequent offenders. And this frequently gets through a couple rounds of revision before I even see it. Like I said, it’s invisible when you’re writing.

Two instances where I won’t flag anything. The first is across paragraphs. If you use editing tools like I do (because having a digital flashlight helps considerably) you notice apps like ProWritingAid don’t like multiple sentences starting with “I/You/The/etc.”  regardless of paragraphs and dialog. The trouble is the reader doesn’t care. Even with action beats and dialog tags, everything inside the quotation marks is a new thought. And everything in other paragraphs should be separate thoughts. This happens, then this happens, then someone says this. So I ignore it. If it bugs the writer, then the writer can fix it.

The other case is when it’s deliberate. Someone is hammering a point home. “You never pick up your laundry. You never take your dishes to the sink. You never put the toilet seat down. You are a slob.” (Scenes from my first apartment. I wonder how that girlfriend is doing these days? Also, I do put laundry away and take dishes to the sink. Um… Maybe I’ll save that story for the new TS Hottle Substack in a couple of weeks. 😉 ) There, it’s deliberate, almost poetic, and probably humorous. I know some editors who will flag it because they think it’s their job to apply rules instead of make the prose more readable. That’s editing for editing’s sake, and frankly, no one knows or remembers the editor. They do know the writer, who has the power of the almighty Stet when doing revisions. (Incidentally, I did precious few stets with Chris Rhatigan, my predecessor at Down & Out, and Dawn Barclay, now my colleague at that vaunted crime press. We all have similar approaches. And as a writer, they get me.)

A particularly aggressive editor might flag everything. This is not malicious, and if you think that red ink is a stab at the soul, think again. It’s to make you, the writer, think before you stet. I’ve only met one editor who got overly aggressive with applying rules (and his show-don’t-tell example was the most absurd abuse of that chestnut I’ve ever seen), but unless they are rookies, those editors are few. The right editor won’t care (much) about the writer’s feelings, but they damn well better think of the reader, who’s going to be buying your prose. And sometimes, that means breaking the rules for readability.

*With apologies to Adrian Belew