editing suggestions

[auhunter04]

I get a little frustrated with some of the word usage I see in what would be very good stories.
the biggest error I see is misused words like bough for bow type mistakes.

I am by no means a professional at editing although I have done some technical work.
I once met an editor for the New York Times and he gave me the following advice. (it even works on your own pieces)

read the piece three times.
Most importantly read it backwards the first time word by word. This forces you to focus on the word and it's relation to the story.

then read it for grammer

then for overall impression.

I have seen few or minimal grammer errors.

But even if a person who wrote the piece would read the work backwards a lot of word misuse would come to light and elevate the quality of the written piece

Butch

 

[hkf999]

spelling

"grammer" is actually spelled "grammar"

 

[Dual_Triode]

I get a little frustrated with some of the word usage I see in what would be very good stories.
the biggest error I see is misused words like bough for bow type mistakes.

I am by no means a professional at editing although I have done some technical work.
I once met an editor for the New York Times and he gave me the following advice. (it even works on your own pieces)

read the piece three times.
Most importantly read it backwards the first time word by word. This forces you to focus on the word and it's relation to the story.

then read it for grammer

then for overall impression.

I have seen few or minimal grammer errors.

But even if a person who wrote the piece would read the work backwards a lot of word misuse would come to light and elevate the quality of the written piece

Butch

Well, I actually tried this - reading the story backwards. Unfortunately, the story is 40,000 words and this was just too tedious. However, I found that reading forwards, 3 words at a time, caught a lot of errors that I missed the first few times. I guess I tend to read in large "chunks" and my brain subconsciously supplies the missing words. I also think that proofreading your own writing cannot be totally objective.

I also found that I cannot proofread at the computer. I had to print the text out and mark it with a red pen. For fun, I created my own bound copy. It feels good to hold a real book.

Another pretty successful technique was to convert the text to speech and load it onto my iPod. Listening to someone else's voice speak your story changes your whole perspective and makes you listen. I found a lot of errors this way. On the other hand, speech synthesis introduces its own errors, especially with heteronyms.

Overall, I find proofreading is at least as hard as writing the story to begin with.

 

[CopyCarver]

The sad fact is that homophones (the bough/bow errors) are unlikely to be caught by the author, no matter what he/she does. Automated spelling/grammar checks won't find them so long as the misused word is in fact a valid word. It's extremely unlikely that any number of proofreadings will help, since the author obviously thought he/she had chosen the correct word in the first place. The only viable solutions to the problem are finding a good editor or checking almost every word against a good dictionary.

The same is true, of course, of plot bombs, oopas, etc. If the author didn't believe their predicating "factology" was plausible, they wouldn't have used it, and they're unlikely to find it during proofing. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that an an editor will spot spot this type of error either, especially if it lies in a rather arcane field of knowledge, but having a second set of eyes doubles the chances of getting it right.


On-screen edits are undoubtedly better than nothing, but they are poor substitutes for edits done on hard copy. For a while, there were hypotheses that computer editing was difficult only for geezers who are intractably attached to pen-and-ink; younger writers who grew up with computers would have no problem, it was theorized. However, a half-dozen major studies proved that the age of the editor has almost no impact. Even children as young as eight or nine caught far more errors on hard copy than on screen, in controlled tests. Paper consistently wins by a huge margin.