The Red Pencil Technique

Tom French, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, goes through his stories line by line and with a red pencil and puts a check mark on every fact and assertion in his pieces. Every mark means the fact or assertion is known or he has double-checked it. He does not turn his stories in until every fact and assertion has a check.

French has discovered from this process that in making transitions he sometimes made overly broad statements. Going through the red pencil process forced him to account for the accuracy of these statements and helped him tighten his writing.