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.

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, but was not in the original (2015).

New in 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Style and Voice

Basic Building Blocks: Sentence Structure and Punctuation

Nouns and Pronouns

Nouns and Noun Phrases

Capital Errors

Pronouns

Apostrophes

Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives

Adverbs

Verbs

Sentence Structures

Punctuation Summaries

Punctuated Equilibrium

Punctuating Dialog

Commas to Leave Out

Commas to Put In

Avoiding Other Common Errors

Commonly Confused Words

Common Typos and How to Check For Them

Research

Names and Words

Common Factual Errors

Blocking

Submitting to Editors

How to be a Light Hybrid Author

How Editors Decide

Basics of Standard Manuscript Format

Further Reference

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Get The Well-Presented Manuscript here:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo
• iBooks
• Oyster
• Scribd
• Inktera

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.