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Proofreading tip
Editing and re-editing your own work can make you hate it with a passion you reserve for spammers and people who kick dogs. And after a while you just start glossing over the text, not noticing that a question ended with a period or that a word is repeated.
So I’ve taken to having the computer read back to me what I’ve written and follow along. In Microsoft Word, just open the Speech window (in Office 2004 for Mac I have to right click in one of the toolbars), select the text you want spoken, and click Speak Selection.
You use Mac OS X’s System Preferences/Speech/Text to Speech panel to select the voice and the speed. For my book Good Cop, Dead Cop, I appropriately used Alex, for My Particular Friend Vicki.
The voices are not great and some words make you cringe — “yeah” in GCDC and “miss” in MPF, but they do make it easier to notice that repeated word or lack of a question mark or comma.
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