The final significant reasons for rejected manuscripts are not readily discussed by writers since most writers don’t like talking about them or accepting responsibility for correcting them.
Ignoring rules of Craft
Writing has rules. If your partner, your muse, or even your pet turtle tell you differently, show them the hand; even the finger. The hardest set of rules in writing you must abide by are the rules of Grammar.
For some reason, grammar has fallen out of favor with teachers who claim your parents should have taught you and by parents who claim it is your teachers’ duty to teach you grammar. Let me remove all doubt as to who is responsible for how you write; you are. Not your parents and not your teachers. The rejection slip does not go to them. It goes to you. Luckily for us, Grammar, like Mathematics, is based on a set of rules. All you need do is work within the rules, and you have resolved the problem. But where are these rules and how do we use them?
Take a deep breath and try to relax. This post is not mutating into a ten thousand word essay on the use of the collective noun. I don’t even intend to tell you the rules. I am going to tell you where to find them and how to apply them. Think of your first visit to an attorney’s office. You probably were impressed with the volumes of law books on display. As a writer, you only need one (honestly just one) rule book. It isn’t even as thick as the St. James Bible. But, to keep this in perspective, you do want the physical book. You do not want the ebook version even though it is available. Since this book is for reference, it requires physical interaction. The book, preferably hardbound, is The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. You will use it only when whichever of the next two tools I offer you give you just a vague answer, and you need to hear from the expert. The expert and your faithful friend for questions of style is William Strunk.
Electronic tools for style and spelling
The problem and the greatness of tools found in books are they are tactile and time-dependent. I present you with a choice of two tools which help you comply with the rules of grammar, style, and some of the laws of spelling. Both tools offer a free trial period, and I strongly suggest you read all the available information on both before making your decision. The two tools packing the most bang are Grammarly and ProWritingAid.I have used them both and the one I think is the better product is Grammarly. It is leaner and sparser than ProWrtitingAid. Grammarly offers a desktop application into which you can copy or load your manuscript. You can specify information about the manuscript and its projected audience. Grammarly, with tremendous accuracy, will point to almost all the flaws in grammar, style, and spelling. Its advantage is that it tells you what it thinks is the correction which you can accept or reject. It also gives you an overall score of your writing and how you rank amongst other equivalent Grammarly users. Its most robust value, in my opinion, is its leanness. You don’t get flooded with information about the error. Nor does it give you all the possible corrections. It provides what it computes to be the best answer for your writing audience. To me that is invaluable. The cost of Grammarly after the trial period is $70.00/year. It can be paid by the year or by the month.
ProWritingAid is an excellent product. If you choose, it will provide you with almost too much information. It interacts with most browsers and most word processors. It even works well with Scrivener. I would have paid more attention to it if it had worked well with Ulysses. When I was using it, I could find no flaws in either its performance or the information provided. Again, for me, it was giving far more than I needed and much more than I wanted. For people beginning to write and for people who know they are not very good with style and structure, ProWritingAid is an excellent application. After the trial period, ProWritingAid will cost you $50.00 for the first year. For three year it is $100.00. For a permanent license, it is only $175.00. Either product is invaluable for the price. While deciding on my choice, I subscribed to them both for a year and used them both for everything I wrote. Grammarly gave slighter better results when confronted with more obtuse grammatical errors. My suggestion is to pick the product that best serves your needs.
The final reason why many editors reject a manuscript is by what is in, or what is not in the cover letter. That will be the discussion for part three of this series.
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