I'm Sarah Dobie, I'm an editor and I hate bad writing. Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, the little blue bird on Twitter, the first two are writers and they write easy reader books that make us all dumber. The little blue bird on Twitter prioritizes the use of 140 characters and how can you be eloquent or grammatically correct in 140 characters. Tonight I'm going to show you bad writing. I'm showing you bad writing. I hope to make you into better writers. And this is not a presentation for one of the novelists. Bad writing is everywhere. It's in your emails. It's in your office memos. It's even on your Facebook status updates. So are you ready to be a better writer? Let's start with punctuation. Ellipses, you know what they are. They're the dot dot dot. And they're fine in moderation. For some reason people tend to get ellipses happy. Ellipses make you look unsure of what you're saying. They weaken your email, they weaken your posts. No one wants a lawyer who says things like, I'm pretty sure you didn't kill anyone. Dot dot dot. Next up, adverbs. Do you like adverbs? Yeah. Do you remember what adverbs are? Adverbs generally modify verbs. They describe the how and in what way of something as in Sarah rapidly chugged her drink before coming on stage. How did I chug my drink? Rapidly. Behind adverbs, they're the easy way out. I don't have to create carefully crafted dialogue. If at the end of the sentence I can just add, he said, angrily. It's that show don't tell thing you've been hearing about since junior high. Show your character as angry. Don't tell everyone about it. Now the worst part of my day, obvious for medical and punctuation errors. Are you old enough to drive a car? Because if you are, you should know that why you are is not the same as why you apostasy are. I know you know these things. It's not a lack of knowledge. It's because you rush. You send emails to important clients. You send hours laying out promotional flyers and sending them to your printer. But do you look them over before you send them? That's really all it takes. Continuing on. Avoid sounding smarter than you are. I know you're all very smart, but using the Fisaurus tool every five seconds is not cool. It's confusing or better yet it's bewildering. When was the last time you used the bewildering in a sentence? Probably never. So why would you use it in your emails? Now for you writers out there, we all remember past and present tense, right? Present tense, I'm standing on stage. Past tense, I stood on stage. Never, under any circumstances, should you be using present and past tense in the same sentence? An example from my job, David notices Mira is upset and said, what's the matter? The matter is you're using past and present tense in a single sentence. Now there's plenty more about bad writing I would love to share with you, but I only have five minutes, not five years. So to recap, one, one, elitzies are bad unless you sparingly, two, overuse of adverbs decreases the impact of your writing. Three, obvious, grammatical and punctuation errors make you look stupid. Four, showing off your intelligence by using big words is cool, on jeopardy. Not on your office memos and five, stick to your tenses, but I haven't told you the most important part yet. For that, I'll turn to my boy, Stephen King. If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write. I guess that's what this is all about. One of the last time you read a book, I don't mean a comic, a sure-it-tell, don't mean a blog or a Twitter. I mean an actual book, because that is what really matters. If you want to be a better writer, you must first become a better reader. So if you really want to learn how to write, go read a damn book. And please, avoid the Da Vinci code and the Twilight series. Thank you.