Pulitzer Prize-winner Amy Ellis Nutt shares some tips for editing your own writing in a new advice column on Nieman Storyboard. She says this about passive verbs: "Write in the active voice, not the passive. I’m amazed at how often this still happens in my own writing. Avoid: 'to be,' 'to have' and 'to do.' And make sure your verbs push the story forward. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote to his daughter, 'All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentence.'"
February 17, 2013