Being wordy: how much is too much?!

This part of copy editing is a little more difficult, especially when you're editing your own work. There are several good reasons for keeping it simple (the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid!) and the first is, if you get too clever with rare, offbeat words, some of your readers won't know what you're talking about!

Think of your readers as your customers. They have to buy your book, enjoy it, and be eager for your next one to come out. This is how you build a reader base, and a career. And if you're too verbose, too "clever" in your writing ... perhaps you like to show off a massive vocabulary! ... you can lose customers. They just can't follow you without hitting a dictionary too often. (Here's a mildly worrying fact: few people in 2009 even own a dictionary.)

Copy editing is about picking out and correcting all kinds of errors, including errors of style. And one of the mistakes you can easily make is to trip yourself up by simply using the wrong word.

How good is your vocabulary? Seriously. How sure of it are you? If your vocabulary is vast and you never use the wrong word — you already have a head start over other "entry level" writers. However, always keep in mind that your reading levels, and your readers' abilities, can be very different.

It turns out that the majority of readers in the book-buying public are only reading at Grade 7 level. If you get "too smart" with your wording, a significant part of your potential readership will put the book down ... and won't even borrow your next one from the library.

The trick is to find the happy medium. Don't "dumb it down" to the point where you insult intelligent, well-educated readers, but at the same time don't flaunt your vocabulary and baffle average readers. Copy editing gives you the priceless opportunity to take three steps back from the work and look at it through someone else's eyes. You put on your copy editing hat, and you examine the structure of the novel on every level, right down to the choice of words.

You want to sell copies. You want to quit the day job and write for a living. You need to please as many readers as possible, and certainly insult none! Copy editing is your "safety net," where you double- and triple-check everything.

If in doubt, ask for a friend's help. Give him or her a felt pen and tell them to "swoosh" anything they didn't understand at first glance. You might be surprised. In fact, if you have a massive vocabulary yourself, you might be shocked.

There is another sizable problem about using a lot of large, difficult, offbeat or technical terms. If you're not absolutely as smart as you think you are ... you can misuse them. Using the wrong word is a technical sin everyone commits from time to time. The object is to do it very, very rarely.

Here's a list of words which are in common usage; you hear them so routinely, they're quite familiar. Yet ... do you know what they really mean?

Let's play a game ... look them up; award ONE point where you were right, and subtract TEN points where you were wrong. Why take away ten points? Because if/when you use the wrong word in a professionally-submitted manuscript, it glares out of the document like a searchlight ... on the other hand, no one even notices when you use words correctly. It's this easy to scuttle your chances of being published!

circuitous
turbid
turgid
morbidity
moribund
inchoate
truculent
intractable
penultimate

importunate
malapropism
misanthrope
perfidious
portentous
parsimonious
concurrent
erstwhile
cogent
decimate
soporific
existential
pedant
pedagogue
misogyny
sanguine
ennui
proletariat
polyglot
bifurcate
prevaricate
procrastination
feculent
physiognomy
pontification
plenipotentiary
dystopian
meretricious
merritorious
immanent
protagonist
ancillary
antediluvian
cantilevered
mercurial
indefatigable
inimitable
inimical
endemic
quixotic
hagiographer
inexorable
transpire
epigram
perfunctory
cursory
narcissism
punctilious
ingenuous
virgule

How did you score? You'll know by now if you need to work on your vocabulary, or if you're just too smart for your own good! The best tip is simply this: take pity on your readers! Remember that some of them are speaking English as a second, even third language. Get too clever for them, and they don't have a chance ... and in fact, nor do you, because they won't buy your next book!