Boosting Your Confidence in Social Situations

[suzie]

I have had my first article rejected, It says on the email: -
"We cannot accept content with grammar errors, sentence structure errors, instances of awkward wording, or problems with clarity.'

I had another person check the grammar before submitting the article, and she is excellent at English. Could it be that I have spelt 'Centre' the English way, should I have spelt it the US way, as it's an American website? Also I missed that it should have a double space after each paragraph, and either be in 'Arial' or 'Times New Roman' font. I don't want to resubmit it and find these were not the only issues. Any advise would be much appreciated.

Regards Suzie

[Lysis]

I doubt it's only because you spelled a word in the British way. Since he listed off every error he has in his form, I'd say you have some odd sentence structure somewhere.

[JD]

Provided your article has been written in UK English then 'centre' won't be a problem - just don't include both US and UK English in the same article.

When re-reading your article, make sure that every sentence is crystal clear. If you find yourself having to re-read any sentence because it isn't clear on first reading, then you may need to re-word it. Don't leave any sentence that's a little unclear for the reader to work it out for him/herself - that's our job! If I have to re-read any sentence I write because its message doesn't come through straightaway, then I usually re-word it so that the next time I proof it, I (hopefully) don't.

Read your article out aloud as this may help, and again, if you falter over any sentence, if it doesn't trip off your tongue, take a look to see if it can re-worded to be improved.

Stick with it. Good luck!

Jane

[suzie]

Thank you so much for your feed back, I was feeling maybe I will never be a good writer, I will keep trying.