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Writing Cormac McCarthy shares his advice for pleasing readers, editors and yourself. “For the past two decades, Cormac McCarthy — whose ten novels include The Road, No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian — has provided extensive editing to numerous faculty members and postdocs at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico. He has helped to edit works by scientists such as Harvard University’s first tenured female theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall, and physicist Geoffrey West, who authored the popular-science book Scale.” In 2018 Van Savage, a theoretical biologist and ecologist who received invaluable editing advice from McCarthy when he was a grad student and post doc, worked with McCarthy to condense McCarthy’s advice into bites. Friends, we are lucky they did. These are pearls of writing wisdom. Keep them near where you write. There are 17 total. Here's the first two: • "Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can. • Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it."
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