How do you solve a problem like ‘however’?
Introduction
Maybe all those hours of reading and writing made the final stages of proofreading and copyediting seem too exhausting? Maybe after spending so long reading the same words over and over again, the ideas you were trying to get across seemed clear and easy to understand?
Whatever the reason, when you consider all the work you’ve done, the things that your proofreader/copyeditor/supervisor/lecturer/teacher have commented on just don’t seem to be THAT big a deal. It’s certainly not enough to justify going over all of it again and restructuring your content – which took a bloody long time to write in the first place – just to get rid of the occasional ‘however’. We have all been there.
I spent years being told that my work used ‘however’ too much and my sentences were too long and ‘muddy’. It wasn’t until I started proofreading and copyediting other people’s work that I finally understood what my teachers and lecturers were talking about. Here is an extract from an essay I wrote 18 months ago..

I decided to write this blog to offer some solutions to four common problems I’ve observed, in my editing career so far, that seem to need most intervention. I just wish I’d known about these solutions when I was a student!
Recent Comments