The Editor’s Lexicon by Sarah Cypher

Reviewed for The New Podler Review of Books by Libby Cone

This is a very helpful book. It gives names to many of the pitfalls we try to avoid in our writing, such as scope (which I would call “getting bogged down in one little detail”) and info-dump (nobody wants to know that the conference table was rectangular or the taxi was drive-by-wire). The author even has the courage to use a passage from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight to illustrate weak style! She includes typical editorial comments to demonstrate how one might come across the terminology, as well as book  excerpts illustrating good and bad execution and concepts that might otherwise seem obscure. It is a very short book, but its treatment of editorial lingo gives writers another tool for looking at their work with a bit more objectivity.

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Sarah Cypher is the author of "The Editor's Lexicon: Essential Writing Terms for Novelists" (Glyd-Evans Press, 2010) and runs a two-woman editing and book design shop, The Threepenny Editor.