I’ve observed three distinct phases of writing growth/evolution.

The first phase is what I’d expect from a high school sophomore who does not plan to graduate with distinction; mostly intelligible, but with enough basic problems that fixing bad habits are a ways off. It mixes up to/two/too, can’t get the possessive apostrophe right, and doesn’t know what it’s doing with punctuation. It sometimes believes that more exclamation points are more impactful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! At other times, it believes in no punctuation, nor even para breaks.

It’s awful, but it will suffice in life for basic needs. For many people perhaps that’s satisfactory. (Maybe they’re brilliant at plumbing. Great. You hire me to write important stuff for you, and I’ll hire you to do plumby stuff. All good.) That might seem heretical, but becoming a quality writer is not easy for most people, and until people come to me insisting that the first tier is acceptable for professional published writing, we have no quarrel.

The second phase writes clearly enough, but its lazy habits keep it stuck in the middle. It overuses adverbs. It does not understand what’s wrong with comma splices. It loves italic emphasis, ellipses, em dashes, passive voice, and various other common writing weaknesses. It ranges too far afield, too often, from the straightforward declarative sentence. Most first-time novelists arrive in this stage, and many never exit it before they self-publish.

The third phase has learned to avoid the second’s failings. Up to this point, editing can only partly be about content because there are many mechanics to address. The term “cognitive load” comes into play, because one is pouring on so many other teaching points that some clients could become overwhelmed with second-phase and third-phase feedback. In this stage, the writer can write well, and our focus is on the fine points: pacing, clarity, word choices, flow, and so on.

For those seeking to exit the second, here are things to fix and how to fix them:

Question every non-dialogue adverb, with the goal of choosing a better verb. People told you to burn your thesaurus; this is why you disobeyed.

A comma splice occurs when the comma divides a sentence into parts that could stand alone, it looks like this. Unlike most parts of speech, which have their roles and places and jobs, this is an error pure and simple.

Permit yourself one non-dialogue italic emphasis per 25,000 words.

Permit yourself one non-dialogue ellipsis per 20,000 words.

Permit yourself one or two em dash constructions per chapter. And begrudge.

Launch a frontal and flank attack on non-dialogue passive voice. Attempt to recast every last instance. Surrender only when there is no other option, such as there is no definable subject to assign.

As hinted earlier, dialogue is different. Rules for dialogue and internal monologue (thoughts) are looser because people think and speak otherwise than they write. That doesn’t meant that all the rules are suspended, but it does mean more patience for italics, ellipses, and so on. You have heard the breezy boast “I write like I talk,” as if that’s something to be glad about, but you might not have heard my rejoinder: “Too bad, because people don’t read the way they listen.” Broken Dolly Syndrome ensues. And yet, as with everything but those damn comma splices, there’s a time and a place. Dialogue and IM, treated as spoken, can be more “write like I talk” because they are talking in some form. Of course, one really means “write like your characters talk,” but people get the idea.

When I get a manuscript, I must figure out how much of phases one and two remain in play. Phase one writers rarely end up hiring me, because my report says that their writing needs a lot of work, and they either don’t want to do that work or didn’t want/expect that answer. Phase two writers are likelier to hire me, especially if I can show them how to get to phase three (I can). Phase three writers are the toughest and most rewarding, because they ask questions. Lots of questions. They want to know why. I must not tell a phase three writer to do anything unless I’m ready with the reasoning, because odds are they will ask me for it.

This is good. This is how I grow in my own work.