The Well-Presented Manuscript is a book, of which this blog is a draft. The final book contains extra material not on the blog, and you can get it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, Oyster, Scribd or Inktera. It’s now in its fourth edition (2025), completely reorganized and heavily revised.
I’m Mike Reeves-McMillan, former copy editor and tech writer, current active author (of novels and short stories) and book reviewer. I grew tired of seeing the same simple errors in one published book after another—traditionally published as well as indie—so I decided to write a clear guide to just the things you need to know to come across as professional.
Below is the table of contents for the book, with links to posts on this blog where applicable. Note that the blog is a draft, and I revised and expanded each chapter, and added a lot more material, when writing the book.
I’ve also written a summary post of the five most common errors, which is included in the book from the 2020 edition on, but was not in the original (2015).
New as of the 2022 edition, which also expands the popular Commonly Confused Words section by more than a third:
- A guide to when and when not to use a comma with “of course”: Of Course There’s No Comma.
- Guidance on using (or rather, not using) “alright”: Is “alright” all right?
- A different and more nuanced approach to the vexed question of “lie” versus “lay”: Laying a lie to rest?
- Compound words, phrases, and hyphenation.
- Writing Englishes, a basic guide to some key differences between British and American English for native speakers of one variety of English who want to write characters who speak the other variety.
The 2025 edition has been completely restructured to focus on the 10 most common types of errors:
- Vocabulary. Now almost 200 entries on pairs, trios, or single words that are easily confused with each other or used incorrectly.
- Apostrophe usage. Two simple rules will enable you to get the apostrophe in the right place every time.
- Narrative tense. How to stop jerking your readers around in time so they have a smooth reading experience. Revised and expanded.
- Commas of identity (vocative and appositive commas). How to fix one of the easiest ways to spot amateurish writing.
- Commas of sequence (coordinate commas and lists). How to avoid an error that even some good writers still make. Revised and expanded.
- Commas of grammatical structure (phrasal commas). How to know where—and where not—to put a comma, without having to guess.
- Capitalization, hyphenation and other punctuation marks. Many different errors described and corrected.
- Dialog punctuation. A persistent problem for a minority of writers, with a few easy rules.
- Clarity of reference (number agreement, pronoun errors, dangling modifiers). Make sure your readers understand exactly what you’re talking about without having to stop and work it out. Revised and expanded.
- Research and knowledge. Common slip-ups that are easily corrected. Revised and expanded, including an extensive guide to differences between British and American English for authors who speak one, but whose characters speak the other.
At the back of the book is a simple reference for grammatical terminology and concepts, and a resource section for further reading.
Everything is still directed at improving the working fiction writer’s grasp of mechanics and usage, so that your prose reads smoothly and your readers can immerse themselves in your story.
On This Blog:
Punctuation Summaries
Avoiding Other Common Errors
Common Typos and How to Check For Them
Get The Well-Presented Manuscript here:
My next nonfiction project is Writing Short: The Craft and Commerce of Short Fiction. The working outline is available here (Google doc). Subscribe in the sidebar if you want to be kept informed.
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