Editing your manuscript...

[VydorScope]

So I finished my fifth book recently and gave it to my wife for editing. Understand I gave her a PERFECT work of art. There were no errors in it at all! (as you all know from reading my posts, I am the model of excellent English) She then brutalized the document till the virtual paper bleed out all over the virtual desk with virtual red ink.

So fine, now the doc should be good, so we ship it off to our professional editor.. who spends less ten 1/50th of the time that it took me to write the first draft and again brutalizes it. After awl, we awl knowe I tipe purfectley and awl editors due is incert missteaks of coarse!

Anyways... it just amazes me because I honestly do not turn over my document to my wife for editing until I am sure there are no mistakes in it. I mean it, I read it over and over until I make a pass with out touching anything, but still they (my wife and the editor) find stuff on every freaking line.

The people that say they can edit their own work baffle me. I am not calling them liars, or anything, just saying it is not something that I could ever understand pulling off. It be kind of like asking a crab to fly to the moon I think.

[Dr. Drib]

...don't you mean 'bled' out?


She may be your best editor - ever!




Don

[Marseille]

Check out Swimming Naked in a Pool Full of Wolverines: Learn to Perfectly Self-Edit by Actualizing Your Inner Masochist

I believe that one is filed next to D.I.Y. Dentistry in most libraries, if you're having trouble finding it.

[kennyc]

I conspire with you Vincent.

I think some writers are better at it than others. I'm not bad, but I've been know to find errors years later is work I've published. It's so easy to read what you think is there rather than what is actually there.

The best thing is to be able to put it aside for a significant time and come back to it. Also editing in a different form -- e.g. on Paper vs on Screen or On Kindle instead of in the word processor can help bring out the dead ... ummm the errors....

[Nancy Fulda]

You know those cool word illusions where it's hard to spot the repeated word?



Sometimes the position of a word on a page or in a sentence can affect the brain's efficiency at spotting typos. For that reason, it's sometimes helpful to switch to a different font before proofreading. It puts all the words in different places, and makes certain problems easier to spot.

I have a friend who reads manuscripts backwards one sentence at a time when typo-checking. Apparently it helps her brain disconnect from the running narrative so it can concentrate on the grammatical structure of individual sentences. I know other people who strongly advocate reading the text aloud.

None of which will substitute for getting a qualified second pair of eyes to read through the text, of course.

[kennyc]

the....the....the.....that's interesting...

[VydorScope]

Oh the BEST thing for me is to have the computer read the text to me. It will not help with its vs it's of course but it catches so many other things , esply missing or double little words.

[gmw]

And besides typos, some of which have haunted my text past many readers, there are also things that you (the writer) may never pick up. My recent thread about "lounge" was a surprising revelation to me. I've also had various more esoteric grammatical items detected by a very kind reader who knows more of these things than I do. I do reserve the right to ignore some of these items, sometimes how it reads is more important to me than being strictly correct - I think prose in fiction is allowed to be a little poetic (while avoiding clichés, or being excessively trite or obscure) - but a knowledgeable reviewer/editor can help you pick the places where this is acceptable.

Having the computer read aloud to me has been very helpful, not only with doubled, swapped or wrong words, but also highlighting sentences that run on too long for clarity, and sometimes a lack of logical flow of a paragraph will stand out this way too.

[kennyc]

Yes, cultural and language variations...

I've been wrestling with one aspect of my current project all because of poetic license. In particular a poem and section of one of my poetry books is called "Brown Dirt Boy" and I've used that in the subtitle of my current non-fiction work. "True Stories of a Brown Dirt Boy" and see here's the delimma the dirt of our farm was not really brown it was black but 'Black Dirt Boy' just doesn't have the same ring to me. I've considered, am still considering I guess, of whether to point this out in the introduction or to just simply ignore it. It wouldn't matter if I did not in the text specifically mention 'black dirt farm' etc.....

I'm thinking to just 'teach the controversy'

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yes, cultural and language variations...

I've been wrestling with one aspect of my current project all because of poetic license. In particular a poem and section of one of my poetry books is called "Brown Dirt Boy" and I've used that in the subtitle of my current non-fiction work. "True Stories of a Brown Dirt Boy" and see here's the delimma the dirt of our farm was not really brown it was black but 'Black Dirt Boy' just doesn't have the same ring to me. I've considered, am still considering I guess, of whether to point this out in the introduction or to just simply ignore it. It wouldn't matter if I did not in the text specifically mention 'black dirt farm' etc.....

I'm thinking to just 'teach the controversy'

Bear in mind also that almost no speaker of British English will understand your meaning. In British English, "dirt" is simply something that's, well, dirty. What you call "dirt", we call "soil".

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Bear in mind also that almost no speaker of British English will understand your meaning. In British English, "dirt" is simply something that's, well, dirty. What you call "dirt", we call "soil".

There you go Earle, perfect example.

P.S. you guys probably think a boot is something to do with a car too....

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

There you go Earle, perfect example.

P.S. you guys probably think a boot is something to do with a car too....

Everyone knows a boot is Canadian for about. c'mon.

rjb

[mr ploppy]

I read a guide to self editing for authors a while ago, it was full of typos.

[cromag]

Way back when I was using real UNIX to do documentation I became a big fan of the "Writer's Workbench" kit of small programs. You can still find many of them for Linux distros like Ubuntu, but many have to be run from a terminal window. They do include a small program that checks for "double" words -- like "the the."

Right now there's just no way I could afford an editor (I'm trying to save up my sales revenue for a latte at Starbucks), and my wife hates science fiction, etc.

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I read a guide to self editing for authors a while ago, it was full of typos.