Quote:
Originally Posted by E.M.DuBois
And of course, you'd be wrong. I've spent years proofing and reproofing. Spell-check was never my only tool. I like how everyone has to include a spell-check jab, as if it does absolutely nothing for anybody. Anyway, yeah, I'd love to get it edited by a pair of independent eyes. But the whopping $1.16 in my bank account and my inability to offer a service in exchange for editing says that's not happening. So it's just going to have to be me.
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I'm sure you're not alone, particularly with your first book. Conventional wisdom seems to be that it is virtually impossible to get acceptable results doing it yourself. Based on my very limited experience I tend to agree with this. Yet is is no solution to say hire someone when you simply can't. There were certainly some good suggestions made here for helping you to do it yourself, though I certainly doubt my own ability to perform such a task effectively.
Out of curiosity I did a quick search for programs which might be of assistance. This very cursory search revealed the following article:
Paid and Free Editing Software
It discusses 4 programs to assist with editing. One was quite expensive and did not stand out. 3 were described as being free, though of course there is always a catch. Those 3 are EditMinion, Pro Writing Aid editing tool and ClicheCleaner. I also came across a quite lengthy YouTube turorial on the second of these programs, which I glanced at:
http://www.iainrobwright.com/prowritingaid-tutorial/
They look intriguing. Has anyone here actually used any of them? I'm sure they are not perfect but do they represent a big improvement on self-editing? Would be interesting to see if they pick-up the problems pointed out by HarryT and Cinisajoy.