Learning from Rod Serling

"One thing you kneed to no about writing good is this, editing is won of the must impotent parts of the prosthesis its also defiantly the hardiest. You, sir with the café cup on one hand end the confuse look on you're phase; you half a question"?
"What is this crap? Do you have any idea how hard this is to read?"
'But due you no how heard these are two rite ore how fats I'm tipping. Yes, maim, you wit you're fete on the stoolie? Watts year question?
"Don't you know how to spell? My daughter in third grade can spell better than this."
Butt dose she no how to ewes a commuter? How bout a spill cheekier? May be she should of leaned sense nun of this is miss spelled a cording to my competitor. The man in the soot setting be hind that beg desk -- I spouse you also has a comet".
"Pardon me for saying so, but you look terribly foolish making such incredibly obvious mistakes. You can't actually expect me to take anything you say here seriously, can you?"
"Thyme is moony you a busyness man should Shirley no that, I jest don't halve thyme to checker ever little think." "You wit the skate bored and the buggy pans.'
"Dude, this is so not right. Man, if you're going to lay some words on us, they like so have to be the right words or we're out of here."
" Evan you? I though you wood understand Don't get sew hang up on a little think lake spelling and punk chew a shun. Hay sir, wear are you going?"
"I've got a headache, and it's not because of the coffee. Call me when you've learned how to write something I can read, something I don't have to work so hard to understand."
'Ma'am, donate tell me your leafing to.'
"Yes, me, too. I can hardly wait for little Amanda to get home from school so that I can have an intelligent conversation. Don't send me anything until you've gotten a little smarter or at least until you're able to make me think you're a little smarter."
End you sir, yore company, with out me Yule". . .
"We'll get along just fine. And you're absolutely right: time is money, but thyme is an herb. I have an appointment with my doctor. At least he knows the difference between a comma and a coma."
'Dud? "
"That's dude, man. And sorry, dude, but I'm gone, too. This whole scene is so bogus. And, man, I know some dudes who are punks, but they've never chewed a shun. Saying that about them is just the ultimate rudeness. Later, dude."
"Weight! Wade! Come bake! Re member-- its knot how you said it but watt ewe say." Don't judge a book buy it's clover."" Thick off the substance knot the stile. Pleas comb back! "I half sum rely grate ideas. Pull lease, I knead ewe! Aye cant go on a loan!'''
[Fade to black.]
[Rod Serling's voice over a wavering field of stars] "There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to our writer. It is a dimension as vast as a Charles Dickens novel and as timeless as good poetry. It is the middle ground between errors and mistakes, between antonyms and homonyms, and it lies between the pit of man's ignorance, and the summit of his laziness. . . . This is the dimension of the editor. It is an area which we call . . .
The Twi-Write Zone.
Mr. Arthur Waller -- inexperienced writer, surveyor of light popular fiction, and viewer of late-night reruns -- has fallen into a world of readers, a world that is foreign and strange to him and one about which he has, for too many years, made wrong assumptions. He started the day as he always had -- with a light breakfast and the cartoons from the Times -- and then, when an idea occurred to him, wrote a fast draft of an article. He felt good about it and assumed that this is how professional writers feel upon writing something and that this piece which he had composed was now ready for print and the public. What he didn't understand was that this public was a far different creature than he had imagined. To his astonishment, they would accuse, not forgive; were anxious, not patient; were intelligent, not slow-witted; were easily distracted and unwilling to do the writer's work for him. In short, they expected the writer to do his part, and then and only then would the readers do their part. This is the world in which our writer is lost, a place from which he can never escape but which he must try to understand. His only hope is, of course, to change his mind and his habits if he is to survive and thrive in . . .
The Twi-Write Zone.
Let us then offer him, and anyone else who might venture into this sometimes strange and always difficult world, some hints for editing and proofreading which will help him survive:
1. Learn the basics of punctuation and sentence structure from a good composition teacher and/or from a good handbook. This is as fundamental as a carpenter learning how to pound nails or a fireman learning to climb a ladder. Punctuating correctly and writing and recognizing complete sentences should be so automatic for writers that you hardly have to think about it.
2. At least once a year read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. It's an excellent refresher in the fundamentals of good writing and a compact book (only about 90 pages) that all writers -- no matter how long they've been writing -- can learn and relearn from.
3. Read well-written books since doing so will help you absorb the language, conventions, and sentence structure of the writer's work. Most popular writers, like Stephen King, Lavyrle Spencer, and John Grisham, writers who crank out a book once a year or every few months, don't take much time to rewrite or edit carefully and thoroughly.
Their language is often simple and at or near a tenth-grade reading level and their sentence structure lacking in complexity. They may tell good stories, but they rarely challenge or help other writers improve their mechanics or stretch themselves stylistically. Read good contemporary writers like Tim O'Brien, Annie Proulx, Gabriel García Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jon Casey, Sherman Alexie, Gretel Ehrlich, and others. Read classics -- Hemingway, Austin, Joyce, Faulkner, Steinbeck, etc. People who read a lot typically are more capable writers and editors than nonreaders are.
4. Get feedback from another writer or join a writers' response group. Find others who are also trying to write for readers and who would be willing and able to read your work and help you improve it. A group like this can not only improve the quality of your writing but also motivate you to write regularly and write more.
5. Read, reread, and then put your work away for a day or two before reading it again. Getting away from something you've written and worked hard on is the best way to help yourself see it with fresh eyes again. Sometimes even just being able to forget about the draft by watching ER or Oprah or by sleeping or going for a run can clear your mind of your preconceptions about what you've said and allow you to come back to the piece with something approaching a tough, critical reader's eye. Distance not only makes the heart grow fonder but also makes the editor's eye grow clearer.
6. Use but don't rely exclusively on spell-checkers. They catch things that aren't words, but they don't read in context and as a result can't tell you if you have the wrong words. They can only tell you if you have words.
7. Buy and use a good dictionary. Not only that, read it. Try reading one page every day or every other day, and in a notebook write down each unfamiliar word that strikes you as useful, distinctive, and worth including in your own writing along with its definition. This is an excellent, efficient way to improve your vocabulary and your spelling skills.
8. Read your work out loud to yourself. Listen to what you've written because doing so will often help you notice repetition, unintentional rhyme, or awkwardness that isn't noticeable when you simply look at the words on the page. If it sounds wrong or makes you stumble as you're reading, something probably is wrong, something that needs to be changed.
9. Read your work backwards, one sentence at a time. This may sound strange, but it works, especially for people who have trouble with fragments or those who have worked on a piece so long and reread it so many times that they've nearly memorized it. Start at the end of the piece and read the last sentence first, then the second to the last sentence, and so forth through the piece. This forces you to look at individual grammatical units and is more likely to help you recognize fragments because now they're isolated and read in a different, incomplete context. Doing this can also help you notice missing words, spelling errors, and grammatical problems that you didn't notice because when reading the piece from beginning to end you focus on meaning; reading backwards removes meaning and allows you to focus on the mechanics of how you said things.
10 According to Raymond Carver in his essay "On Writing" (Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, Vintage Contemporaries, 1989), "Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say." This is the attitude that any writer worth his salt should bring to his or her writing.
We can only hope that Arthur Waller is able to adapt and open himself to the possibilities that exist around him, for though the physical elements of his life might appear unchanged, the real world of the writer in which he now finds himself will change him and the way he works, or he will forever find himself lost in . . . The Twi-Write Zone!

(Randy Koch teaches creative writing and English composition at Laredo Community College, and is editor of LCC's La Frontera arts journal.)