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Paula LaRoque’s resumé bleeds experience. Besides her role as as an author, she is a columnist for the Society of Professional Journalists’ Quill magazine, a frequent commentator for public radio, a former college educator, and a communications consultant. For twenty years, she acted as writing coach for the The Dallas Morning News.

Last Saturday, LaRoque presented “The Secrets of Good Writing” to the NC/NE Texas SCBWI chapter. Her basic tips—create a loose outline, make bios for your characters, keep your files organized—echo what many other authors advocate.

The rest of her advice affects the finer points of writing. La Roque shuns vague terms, wordiness, and careless usage. A few of the many highlights of her practical tips include:

• Don’t write consecutive chapters. Write the scene you feel like creating today.
• Don’t polish a chapter while writing a first draft. It’s harder to cut a bad chapter later if you’ve already committed the time to edit and proof it.
• Avoid telling every detail. Skip what readers can fill in for themselves.
• Dense blocks of text turn readers away. Vary your sentence length. Bear in mind studies show sentences with 25 or more words confuse and deter readers.
• Try not to sound impressive for the sake of sounding impressive. Ask yourself, “Would I talk this way?”
• Prune vague qualifiers such as very, totally, wholly, and utterly.
• In most cases, keep one idea per sentence.

The tip that I don’t doubt made the audience cringe from guilt was the simple admonition: Use the right word. In an effort to sound educated or skilled, writers will use words they don’t really understand. Think about it: do you really know what “decimate” means? (Hint: The definition does not mean to entirely destroy.) How about disinterested, notoriety, or fortuitous? If someone says, “Boy, the executives really had that salesman run the __________,” should the missing word be “gauntlet” or “gantlet?”

Point is, writers must know a word’s meaning before they use it. Seems obvious, and yet I sense many of you are already reaching for your dictionaries to look up words like “notoriety.” I did.

LaRoque offered many other guidelines to her audience. For more of her tips, check out The Book on Writing: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Well, On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work—and Don’t, and Championship Writing: 50 Ways to Improve Your Writing. Or, visit her blog and website.