The Naval Safety Center’s English 101:
Lessons Learned from 25 Years in the Editorial Trenches

Part I:  Editing

• Lesson #1- Why Articles Get Edited
• Lesson #2- What makes good articles great and bad articles awful?
• Lesson #3- The Editor's Shopping List- Eight Things Readers Want
• Lesson #4- Kinds of articles and how to organize them
• Lesson #5- Opening the Envelope
• Lesson #6- What A Magazine Article Does (and Doesn't Do)
• Lesson #7- Planning Articles
• Lesson #8- From the reader's perspective, what is the most obnoxious thing that an editor can do?
• Lesson #9- The "S" word -- Can we publish safety magazines without using the word "safety"?
• Lesson #10- To Cut or Not To Cut
• Lesson #11- How to Tell a Rookie Is at the Keyboard
• Lesson #12- What makes a photo effective?

Part II:  Writing

• Lesson #13- The Writing Process and a Template for a Basic Article
• Lesson #14- Ten Things You Should Know About Writing Articles
• Lesson #15- Ten Steps to Writing an Article
• Lesson #16- Headlines, Titles, Labels and Captions
• Lesson #17- Making the Most of Verbs
• Lesson #18- Lame Conclusions
• Lesson #19- Jargon defined- argot, bureaucratese, cant, colloquialism, dialect, double-talk, euphemism, gibberish, gobbledygook, jargon, pentagonese, slang
• Lesson #20- 10 Ways to Botch Writing Assignments

Part III: Nuts and Bolts

• Lesson #21- Grammar Compendium
• Lesson #22- Modifiers- modifer strings and commas; compound modifiers; various problems with modifiers; useless modifiers and habitual hair-splitting
• Lesson #23 - Parallelism, Consistency and Items in a Series
• Lesson #24- Passive Constructions
• Lesson #25- Capital Letters and Alphabet Soup

Part IV:  Practice

• Lesson #26- FOG Factor -- Things That Make Sentences Wordy
• Lesson #27- Ambiguity, Contradictions and Partial Truths
• Lesson #28- Awkwardness
• Lesson #29- Punctuation- colons; semi-colons; commas; apostrophes; how to punctuate a title; prepositions
• Lesson #30- Redundancy and Extra Words
• Lesson #31- #- Cliches
• Lesson #32- I.E. vs. E.G.
• Lesson #33- Some thoughts on leads
• Lesson #34- Lists and Bullets in Text
• Lesson #35- Noun strings
• Lesson #36- Numerals
• Lesson #37- Numerals and units of measurement
• Lesson #38- Qualifiers and intensifiers
• Lesson #39- Vague Adjectives and Adverbs
• Lesson #40- Tricks of the Trade for Proofreading

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