Jerod Buchler

Cutting the Fat from Your Writing

November 15, 2020October 26, 2020Jerod Buchler

By: Jerod Buchler

Yes, it is very important to meet a word count to get a work accepted, but once you meet that word count then you must be concise enough to not bore the reader. To such a point where the editor will not even finish reading it. When writing for school we are taught to do everything in our power to meet that word count even if that means sacrificing the quality of that work. That is a stigma that we need to cut through because as someone who will possibly need to read through these works if I end up getting lost in all of the useless words, I will give up on it and dismiss it entirely. When I give up on it entirely, then I will vote it out of the magazine.

So when I tell you that I don’t want to see phrases in your writing like, “as follows,” or even things like, “what I was saying earlier,” I mean it, because that is the stuff that takes away from good writing and makes it bad. Those are the phrases that make the whole piece tears apart at the seams. When these writings are too lengthy, they get boring, then whatever you had to say just gets thrown out the window, because no one can get through it. I would say that the crucial thing to remember about writing with a word count is to not add things just for that word count add things that mean something for the writing even if that takes you longer to think about and come up with. So instead of writing something and focusing on the word count of it write something that you care about and the word count will follow, and you won’t have to worry about it. The biggest example that I can give about writing about something that you care about is take something that comes from the heart and write about that and there will never be a shortage of words needed to fill up that count. If you write something just to get some sort of response from people than there is a good chance that you will just wrack your brain trying to squeeze out enough words to make a word count.

Find Your Voice

March 29, 2020March 25, 2020Jerod Buchler

Once when I was in high school, I was in my ENC: 1102 class after coming off an almost failed previous semester that I was looking for, the god send if you will he told me one day during one of our writing assignments that he knew I could write but all of the assignments that he had seen from me felt so empty. If I’m being honest my writing was empty and flat and that was because I was so concerned about my writing being grammatically correct rather than having my writing mean something.

that the biggest thing that I want to convey in this editorial is that the weight of what you’re saying is what people want to feel. People who read are not going to feel the weight of how you used you’re instead of you are, they are going to feel the weight of the conviction of what you are writing and the fact that you care about you’re writing. I feel that a lot of the writing that is going to come through a slush pile is going to be so sterile feeling and too clean. In my opinion I want to read something that is real and means something to the person who created that, and I can feel that real feeling as I read it.

When you were a kid in grade school there was always a point no matter how much you loved writing that you would hate having to learn the writing skills you just wanted to write and put your thoughts on paper. When I was in high school I wrote about a few things that were very important to me at the time, things that were so hard to talk about that I had to write them down like family issues and also issues in my community. These issues were so important to me that you could see that they hurt me so much there was such a rawness in my writing that actually showed people that I had something important to say that is why I want to write and you should too.

So, I will leave you with this have you ever decided to read a grammatical handbook for pleasure? You will read the handbook for the skills not for you to feel something. You need to get back to the basics of writing and write about what is important not what you feel is going to catch the eyes.