This 11th and penultimate chapter of Self-Editing for Everyone is inspired by and expands upon The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, available for the price of a 20-oz. latte from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores worldwide.

Homophones: Sounds Like…
Just three days ago, I was eagerly reading a new book—a winner of no fewer than three literary awards, originally published by one of the world’s largest publishing companies. The writing engaged me, and the author was doing a bang-up job with his story and characters. Before I got to the end of the first chapter, however, a band arrived on the scene. They unpacked and began playing their instruments, including a drum and a pair of clashing symbols.  “How appropriate,” I thought as I bookmarked an error that had gotten past its author, an acquiring editor, a copyeditor, a proofreader, and the author again correcting page proofs, “that my next article will be about homophones.”

Homophones are words that sound alike but have different meanings. Unlike ordinary misspellings and mis-typings, homophones will walk right past the watchful eye of your spellchecker without even slowing down to show ID. They require careful reading and re-reading to pin down and destroy. The fact that some survive the editorial process to appear in published works means they have escaped the notice of any number of people, including but not limited to the author, a copyeditor, and—amazingly enough—a proofreader. Never assume someone else will find them for you.

Some homophones, like there, their, and they’re, or to, too, and two, pane and pain, sail and sale, ad and add, and even its and it’s are easy to mis-type and easy to miss on a casual editing pass, especially of your own work. Your mind can know the difference, but that won’t stop your fingers from tripping you up and your eyeballs from letting it happen. Be vigilant.

Homophone errors can also result from the writer’s or editor’s confusion over meaning. There are worlds of difference between affect and effect, peak, peek, and pique, born and borne, or discreet and discrete, but you’d be surprised how often they’re used incorrectly by authors and how often they remain uncorrected by any number of people who are being paid to correct them.

But of course YOU know the difference between a miner and a minor, naval and a navel. You know your sachet from a sashay, rain from reign, a taper from a tapir, and a tenner from a tenor. You know whether you’re wreaking or reeking. You do, don’t you? It’s important to know more about the nuances of the language you’re writing in than your spellchecker does, because if the word you need is altar and you use alter, advanced word-processing technology won’t save you. What might is putting extra eyeballs on the job in the form of an eagle-eyed beta reader, a pass by a copyeditor, and a final independent proofing before publication. If you’re hoping for the skills of a traditional publishing house to correct your homophone errors, you should know that the vast majority of the ones I and readers like me have encountered have been in the pages of books from traditional publishers—from professionals whose day job it was to produce clean copy for the finished product. Virtually no book is free of errors, but you can take responsibility for ensuring yours comes as near that elusive (not illusive) goal as your efforts will allow.

If you’re at all fuzzy on the definition of any word you’re using, look it up and confirm you have the right one, lest your hero travel to Cypress, cash his extra passport under the mattress, pour over the secret documents, auger the coming of his foes, fight a dual with several combat-trained Unix, take to the heir dodging flack, land his plain on the wield, be bitten by tics, escape upriver in a skull rowed by experienced semen, and give in to the temptations of vise while awaiting his true love with baited breath.

Here’s a short list of the most common homophones not mentioned in the article above. 

There are hundreds of homophones in English. Take a few minutes to peruse the lists at www.homophone.com. Some are nearly as far-fetched as the adventure above, but many lay avoidable traps for the unwary writer.

Self-Editing for Everyone Part 10: Passive Voice is brought to you by the letter Z, the number 3, and The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au and all Amazon stores worldwide. Said a kind reviewer: “It's the best writing advice I've ever gotten for the price of a cup of coffee.” The revised and expanded edition is closer to the price of a venti latte, but still....

Passive Voice
If you’ve been at this writing lark any time at all, you’ve probably heard that something called “passive voice” is a no-no. That’s almost entirely true. Passive voice should be eliminated wherever possible. (No! The passive—it burns!) Or I should say: strive to keep your sentences active.

The first step for a writer hoping to understand and thereby eliminate the problem of passive voice from her writing is to understand the difference between active and passive sentences.

In an active sentence, the subject is the person (or place or thing) who performs the action of the sentence. If the subject performs the action on someone (or someplace or something), that becomes the object.

The manager handed Maury his ass. 

Manager is the subject, Maury (and his ass) are objects.

Paris displayed all her autumn colors along the banks of the Seine.

Paris is the subject. Paris acts on colors, which are the object.

The stone struck Alvin between the eyes.

The stone is the subject. It acts on Alvin, who is the object.

In a sentence in the passive voice, the subject and object may trade places.

Maury got his ass handed to him by the manager. 

Maury has become the subject, but he’s not acting; he’s being acted upon by the manager.

All of Paris’s autumn colors were displayed along the banks of the Seine.

The colors have become the subject, but they aren’t doing anything but being displayed. They’ve become passive.

Alvin was struck between the eyes by a stone.

Alvin has taken on subject duty here, but he has nothing to do in this sentence but stand there and get smacked around by the stone.

First rule of active sentences: subjects act.

Sometime a passive voice construction has no actor—the object of the sentence is mysteriously acted upon by no-one at all. 

Mistakes were made.

Explanations were called for.

The body was moved.

The result, as in the previous examples, is a weak, flabby sentence.

Remember this: someone always has to move the body, and passive voice leeches life from your writing.

USMC Ethics Professor Rebecca Johnson famously devised a way to teach her students how to recognize passive voice. If you can add “by zombies” and the sentence still makes sense, it’s passive. Try it!

Mistakes were made by zombies.

Explanations were called for by zombies.

The body was moved by zombies.

I find this a fun way to discover my own passive voice boo-boos. Product warning: you will find yourself shouting “…by zombies!” a lot while watching television. Or maybe it’s just me.

Passive voice also occurs when the writer doesn’t put a real subject—one capable of performing an action—into the sentence. 

There was movement in the bushes.

Note the dread “was.” “There” is not a subject. If you attempt to force it into acting like one, it teams up with “to be” to remove forward motion from your sentence.

Something moved in the bushes.

This is an improvement. “Something,” when it’s not a form of “the word that wasn’t there,” can add a sense of mystery and foreboding when used with intention. Another option would be to show what the POV character experienced, and imply with which sense or senses she perceived it. A rule for all writing at all times: take every opportunity to involve the reader’s senses.

Light flittered through the bushes.

A shadow moved in the bushes.

Leaves fluttered in the bushes.

The bushes rustled.

Corporate communicators are among the front runners in the passive voice sweepstakes.

It still needs to be decided what our growth markets will be for the next year.

We understand what’s being conveyed by your marketing message.

Changes must be made in the way we deliver content.

This kind of communication is vague and equivocal. It says “Things must be done!” and not “We must do this thing.” Whatever needs doing is then somehow assumed to be done by some magical means that don't involve anyone actually doing them. This may explain why the other common place to find passive voice is in political writing.

We need to decide…

We understand what you’re conveying…

We must make changes…

The vague sentences now have subjects that act.

Writers sometimes use passive voice in an attempt to make a sentence sound particularly high-flown:

Our intentions must be matched by our actions, or we will do nothing.

The active subject “we” has been pushed almost out of the sentence here. Who must do something? We must. But in a passive construction, doing doesn’t appear to be anyone’s responsibility. It will somehow just…happen.

We must match our intentions to our actions…

Making the sentence active has transformed it into a call to action.

Leonard was killed.

Who killed Leonard? Apparently no-one. Or zombies. My money’s on zombies.

If passive voice is one of your bad writing habits, you’ll be relieved to know that there are times when it actually works. Use it when you want to show that a character is not an actor in some aspect of his own life, and then in moderation for effect: 

Claire would understand, of course—Marcus was certain she would when all was said and done. There were circumstances, after all. Things happened. Mistakes were made.

If you’ve kept passive construction out of your narrative, the reader will understand that this is somehow different and pay closer attention to what you intend by it.

Are there times when it doesn’t matter who the actor is, or when the actor is so generalized that to use the active voice would be to disturb the intention of the turn of phrase? If there is, you’re bound to encounter it someday. But when you think you’ve found it, first try giving the action to a tangible subject and see if that doesn’t clarify your intention. If it doesn’t, give your sentence wholeheartedly to the zombies.

The Passive Voice BLOG is a passive voice I can totally get behind. If you're an indie author-publisher, indie curious, or just interested in the new world of publishing, you really, really must read it. I can't emphasize loudly enough how important this blog is as a resource and information clearing house for all things 21st century publishing.

This article is brought to you by The Little book of Self-Editing for Writers, available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores.

Misplaced Modifiers and Dangling Participles
There’s a reason many writers don’t show their first drafts to anyone but trusted friends--our first-draft errors can be downright embarrassing. And perhaps nothing is more capable of producing unintended giggles than a dangling modifier. Heck, even the name is giggle-worthy. So how and where do modifiers dangle?

Sometimes writers put adjectives and adverbs  in places where they inadvertently change the meaning of sentences, often with humorous results.

The rule is: put the modifier immediately before the word you want it to modify.

The shiny soldier’s buttons caught and reflected the candlelight.

This sentence introduces us to the shiny soldier, whereas the adjective “shiny” here is supposed to be modifying “buttons.”

The soldier’s shiny buttons caught and reflected the candlelight.

I nearly ran six miles this morning before breakfast.

...but something came up and you stayed home? The adverb “nearly” in this sentence is supposed to be modifying “six,” but appears to modify “ran” instead.

I ran nearly six miles this morning before breakfast.

When Participles Dangle 
“What the bleedin’ ’eck is a participle?” you might be asking. Let’s get that out of the way first. A participle is a verb doing the work of an adjective.

An adjective is a word that modifies a noun.

A fast horse.

Adjective “fast” modifying noun “horse.”

A participle is a form of a verb that ends in “-ing” and also modifies a noun.

A galloping horse.

Participle “galloping” (from verb “gallop”) modifying noun “horse.”

Participial Phrases for the Rest of Us
A phrase that contains a participle is called—not surprisingly—a participial phrase.

Glancing at her lover

Seeking the shelter of the covered bridge

Buttering a scone

Of course by themselves, those participial phrases aren’t sentences. Their place in a sentence is to modify the subject noun by saying what the subject noun is doing.

Glancing at her lover, Lavinia trod upon the dance instructor’s foot.

Seeking the shelter of the covered bridge, Paul dodged another falling frog.

Buttering a scone, Chris pondered the legality of shooting people who run their lawnmowers at 6 A.M.

If you’ve put a phrase containing a verb at the beginning or end of a sentence, that phrase should modify the nearest noun. When you put something in the way of a participial phrase so that it can’t reach the noun it’s meant to modify, we say it’s dangling. When participles dangle, they do strange things to sentences.

When used correctly, the first phrase modifies the noun in the second phrase, and one flows into the other with no loss of meaning.

Believing herself to be in danger, Melanie notified the police.

Knowing sparks were likely to fly, James decided to avoid the whole discussion.

But when used incorrectly, modifying phrases create unlikely results.

Fleeing down the darkened alley, Sandra’s handbag fell to the pavement.

Sandra’s handbag was fleeing down the alley.

Fleeing down the darkened alley, Sandra dropped her handbag.

Now the phrase modifies Sandra, as it should. Or you could ditch the participle entirely and use another sort of modifying phrase:

As Sandra fled down the darkened alley, her handbag fell to the pavement.
--
Having been bitten by a Chihuahua, Rollo’s trust in dogs was practically nonexistent.

A dog bit Rollo’s trust. Neat trick, that.

Having been bitten by a Chihuahua, Rollo felt an extreme distrust of dogs.

Now the phrase modifies Rollo, as is right and proper. Ditching the participle:

Ever since a Chihuahua had bitten him, Rollo had been suspicious of dogs.

Keep your modifying words and phrases with the words they modify, and no-one will ever be able to accuse you of illegal dangling.

TL;DR
Dangling modifiers don’t modify what their authors think they do.

To avoid unintentional hilarity, put your adjectives, adverbs, or participles immediately before the words you want them to modify.

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

The information you're about to read is based on my book, The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, which you can buy, if you wish, at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores on the planet. Now on to this week's article.

Dialogue Tags
Long, long ago, in another century, some bored or desperate soul wrote a book of dialogue tags that could be used in preference to “said.” That writer is lost to well-deserved obscurity, but the term “said-bookism” remains to describe the labored alternatives some writers resort to for tagging dialogue.

A few said-book sorts of tags are justly famous for their unlikeliness. Among them: 

Smile
“I really enjoyed the play,” Imelda smiled. ...as opposed to...
Imelda smiled. “I really enjoyed the play.”

Imelda can’t smile a speech. But she can say something, and she can smile, adding action to the speech.

Gape
“You can’t be serious,” Robert gaped.

Much like Imelda, Robert can’t gape his words. He can say them and then gape, but why should he? His incredulity is evident from his speech. To repeat it is to court Superfluous Redundancy.

Ejaculate
Yes, “an abrupt, exclamatory utterance” can be defined as an ejaculation, but do yourself a favor; don’t go there. Don’t even look at the price of tickets.

To Say or Not to Say
Of course on widely spaced occasions, fictional characters might remark, comment, shout, shriek, whisper, rasp, hiss, mutter, or growl. For the most part, though, and unless there’s a solid reason to have them do otherwise, they just say stuff. Sometimes they ask stuff, and when they do, someone might reply. The word “said” is the best candidate for readers’ eyes to pass over it if it’s not repeated too often, so it’s a good way to tag dialogue while maintaining immersion. The occasional “told,” “asked,” and “replied” or “answered” are likewise nearly invisible when used with restraint.

To lay a bit of popular internet writing advice to rest, a said-bookism is not “…any word used in place of ‘said.’”  “Said” has its own pitfalls and is not the only acceptable dialogue tag. I have nailed my colors to the mast on this one, and will take as many boarders as possible down with me.

“Said”—to get up in the grille of a similar bit of oft-repeated guidance—is not really an invisible word that readers never notice. Too many saids are as annoying as overly-dramatic tags, and readers will notice if you use it too often. How often is too often? You’ll have to play that by ear, and one way to do that is to read some dialogue-heavy portion of your writing out loud. If you feel self-conscious about reading aloud to an empty room (I certainly do, and I figure it’s probably not entirely idiosyncratic), ask your friend, spouse, or dog to listen. Your cat will probably fall asleep, which may affect your confidence.

Another ear-friendly method is to record yourself reading a scene or chapter, then wait a day—or at least overnight—and play back the recording. Excess saids and other awkward items will cry piteously for you to release them from their miserable existence.

Not every line of dialogue needs to be tagged. A well-written fictional conversation can go on for quite a few exchanges without the reader losing his way, especially if the characters have different ways of speaking and/or different goals for the conversation. See Part 6 of this series for an example of a conversation with very few dialogue tags spoken by three characters with three different goals for that scene. Well-written characters with strong intentions put their own stamp on their speeches, much like real people.

Be sparing with dialogue tags. Miserly, even. Use them mainly to avoid confusion as to who’s speaking, and/or to improve the rhythm of a line.

To get extra mileage from a dialogue tag, use it to get in a bit of stage business that either helps reveal character or moves the story forward.

“I’d help you look for him if I could,” Trey said, peering over Haldane’s shoulder for a better look at the paper. “I can’t leave town right now without bringing half the police force behind me.”
--
“He hasn’t been here in days,” Lexie said, letting her eyes slide off to her left, to the darkened hallway. “I’ll tell him you came by.”

Well-written dialogue spoken by well-drawn characters is the heart of any scene, and scenes are the building blocks of your fiction. A vital part of writing good, believable dialogue is knowing how to handle tags with skill and confidence.

TL;DR

Inspect your dialogue for labored tagging that tends to make it over-dramatic. 

If every character in your scene is well-defined with a clear intention, you won't need many dialogue tags. 

Use dialogue tags—sparingly—to improve rhythm, avoid confusion, include stage business. 

Avoid tags like shrieked, sobbed, rasped, hissed, spat, commanded, and intoned. Really. 

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

Be sure to read the earlier Self-Editing for Everyone articles.
Part 1: The Most-Hated Writing Advice Ever
Part 2: Vampire Verbs, Zombie Verbs, and Verbs that Kick Ass
Part 3: Attack of the Adverbs!
Part 4: The Weakeners
Part 5: When Words Get in the Way
Part 6: Secrets of Relative Velocity
Part 7: Two Languages
Part 9: Dangling Modifiers
Part 10: Passive Voice
Part 11: Homophones
Part 12: Point of View Violations