Has anyone else's work attracted trolls?

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

I wish I had trolls. I feel left out.

Maybe you can buy some on Fiverr like some people used to (still do?) buy reviews.

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Maybe you can buy some on Fiverr like some people used to (still do?) buy reviews.

What? Vanity trollery? Never!

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

So what are you? A jay bird who wants to be a writer? With a name like that, no wonder!

(Was that OK? This is my first trolling post. Please be kind in your criticism.)

I was going to ask you how you're enjoying living in your Mother's basement, but I'm too kind for such things.-)

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

I was going to ask you how you're enjoying living in your Mother's basement, but I'm too kind for such things.-)

Touché!

[gmw]

"Waiter! Waiter! There's a fly in my soup!"
"Quiet, please sir, or everyone will want one."


I haven't had trolls, but then I'm not on Facebook or Twitter, which probably helps. (My marketing efforts are almost non-existent, putting me in mind of a Simpson's episode with Ned Flander's father: "You've got to help me, I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas.")

On the other hand, my new found presence on the web has led to people from my past being able to find me. Most recently someone I hadn't spoken to in almost 40 years! (Sadly, none of these contacted me to get signed copies of my books. I must be doing something wrong. )

[E.M.DuBois]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Definitely. Spell-checking is no substitute for editing. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and the impression at the moment is, unfortunately, one of "I can't be bothered to take the time to get it right", to which my response is "... so I can't be bothered to read it".

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.

[E.M.DuBois]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

I wish I had trolls. I feel left out.

Quick guide to get trolls:
1. Get a Twitter account.
2. Tweet a link to your book.
3. Pin Tweet to the top of your profile.
4. Show support for whatever political party you're with. That's a sure-fire technique. Or just express an intelligent opinion in general. No, screw that, just say anything you think is fact and can't be argued. Seriously. "The world is round," will suffice.
5. Sit back and wait. It won't take long, I can assure you. Political-party opinions guarantee results anywhere from seconds to about ten minutes.

[meeera]

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.

Hm, I'm not sure what to suggest, then. Perhaps take some online English grammar courses? If you have edited these things repeatedly and not picked up these errors, and you can't get anyone else to look, I think maybe you need to increase your skills.

I don't think the spell-check comment was a "jab"; all it means is that it won't pick up grammatical errors and homophone errors - some of which your work displays.

[E.M.DuBois]

Originally Posted by meeera

Hm, I'm not sure what to suggest, then. Perhaps take some online English grammar courses? If you have edited these things repeatedly and not picked up these errors, and you can't get anyone else to look, I think maybe you need to increase your skills.

I don't think the spell-check comment was a "jab"; all it means is that it won't pick up grammatical errors and homophone errors - some of which your work displays.

And that's actually a suggestion that a few have put down as well. The most suggested is "Get a pro," and only one person so far has actually considered giving me ways of doing it myself. And I'm trying to look up workshop and edu.pdf's, and I've been amassing a personal educational digi-library on my computer.

[HarryT]

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.

I wasn't suggesting for a moment that you didn't care, just that unfortunately it's the impression it gives. I know you care about your book, but errors give a very bad impression to the reader.

[darryl]

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.

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.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by darryl

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.

There are two main problems: not seeing, and not knowing.

It's a near-universal experience to not see your own errors, particularly when you're close to the work. One thing that can help is to put it aside for weeks/months, then check it again. Another is to get text-to-speech to read it aloud to you. Another is to do multiple very specific editing passes: one looking for homophone errors, one looking for its/it's errors, etc etc etc. Before doing this, it pays to try to identify your own major error areas so you can focus on them.

The second issue is not knowing, and that's even harder to address, because it can take years to really fully learn English grammar and put it into practice if there are large holes in your education. But these words are the tools of your trade: misusing them doesn't inspire confidence in those you're asking to pay you for your work. The work that needs to be put in is worth it. Anyone who thinks it isn't has chosen the wrong line of work.

Lastly, another thing you can do - once you've put in the work on the 'not knowing' issue - is to try to find a critique partner or critique group to help improve your work. But in general that sort of exchange is not for the basic mechanics of writing, it's for the bigger story-telling and craft stuff.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by meeera

The second issue is not knowing, and that's even harder to address, because it can take years to really fully learn English grammar and put it into practice if there are large holes in your education. But these words are the tools of your trade: misusing them doesn't inspire confidence in those you're asking to pay you for your work. The work that needs to be put in is worth it. Anyone who thinks it isn't has chosen the wrong line of work.

Yes, confusing words like "copywrite" (the activity that a copywriter engages in) and "copyright" (the right the law grants you to control who can copy your work) is simply a matter of understanding what words mean. Without that knowledge, no amount of self-editing is going to put it write right.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by darryl

[...]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.

I have not used any of those four, but I did trial the Editor program from Serenity Software. It was an interesting experience but I didn't find it a big improvement.

The software listed literally thousands of potential issues with my draft (when I had all the warnings turned on): commonly misused terms, empty intensifiers, contractions ... and lots more. It is certain to similarly list thousands of items on even professionally edited texts, because English is not a language of hard-and-fast rules: what's right for this character is wrong for that one, and so on. Even homophones can catch it out, for example this software warned about "stories" because in the context it is possible I may have meant "storeys". Useful to have it make you check, but this sort of thing means that even valid text will produce many warnings.

That doesn't make such software useless. You are going to have to check every sentence in your work anyway (many times), so why not have something that asks questions about identifiable issues? The fact that it identifies possible redundancies and colloquialisms is worth considering, even if you decide to keep what you have. Also, having the software count words and phrases, finding things that you may have over-used, was interesting.

But there's the thing: it offers suggestions based on rules, so it will offer the same suggestion over and over again, and it can get so that the warning becomes meaningless, but turn off the warning and you miss the instances where it would have helped you. A human editor, on the other hand, will see which are the invalid instances and tell you - so you know to take the suggestion seriously. That is: a human editor is usually right, this software is wrong so often that you can take it only as vague hints to which you must apply your own judgement. Which means that it doesn't solve either of the two central problems:

* If you don't know what the rules are then you won't understand what the software is telling you, or won't know when to ignore its suggestions. And they are only suggestions, taking each literally would be a huge mistake.

* It still doesn't find everything that a good editor (or experienced reader) will find. Even after going through the results of the Editor software I had someone else go through that found many more issues not discovered. A couple of examples to give some idea what sorts of things it missed from one of my drafts:

"time to finished getting" -> "time to finish getting"

"lounge" -> turns out I was using this in a way specific to eastern Australia.

I might summarise by saying: if you don't actually need the software then it may help a bit, but if you really need the software the chances are you won't be able to make effective use of it.

Such products are worth a look, especially if you want to teach your self about common potential problems, but a complete solution to self-editing they definitely are not - and my own experience was that it was not really a big improvement (but then I had other help).

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by gmw

"lounge" -> turns out I was using this in a way specific to eastern Australia.

You've got me interested to know what the meaning was. In British English it either means "lazing around", or the room in your house in which you engage in such an activity (ie the living room).