I agree!

Accents are fine as long as you know the accent you are writing for. But saying someone has a german accent and then not doing it properly makes you look bad to people who are familiar with the dialect.

If you are writing in deep POV, which is typically easier when you write first person, you can take that internal dialogue and make it a deeper internal thought. We all have that internal dialogue in our heads, but it doesn't have to be every line or even every page in a book. Save it for the good stuff and dig really deep into those internal thoughts, deepening your character in those moments.

Reading your book out loud is a very important step in making sure that you have good cadence and aren't writing dialogue like a robot.

I mentioned being able to google things these days and how easy it makes doing research. You can find out how to do anything in a 5 minute serach.

Not doing research is the worst. I get in the olden days before the internet, but now you can google anything and get an answer.

All of that unnecessary movement slows the pacing. When I am editing, I usually pull it all out. The author doesn't always like it, but sometimes it just has to go.

I see info dumps with a lot of new authors. They haven't been trained to sprinkle that information through the MS. Usually once they are taught they can correct themselves.

I go through a lot of editing clients MS and remove a ton of saids that they place right before they have an action dialogue tag or internal thought tag. It drives me crazy to see unnecessary saids.

so very true!