Feb 03 2010
Tips for Proofreading Your Own Manuscript
Last week a blog reader who’s planning to strike into the world of Indie Authorship sent me an e-mail. Among other things, she said,
Sadly, I combine a strong streak of perfectionism with the ability to overlook glaring typos! I can’t afford to pay for a professional editor to work on my manuscripts and I know you’re a professional editor, so I’m definitely not asking you for free perks
, but if you DO have any “fail-proof” tips for editing beautifully and professionally and catching ALL typos (!) to share with me and the rest of your blog readers, I’d be a happy writer … er … editor!
The fact that you’ve put “fail-proof” in quotation marks indicates you already know one thing: you can’t do a fail-proof editing job on your own writing. In fact, book-length manuscripts are such complex things that it takes a whole staff of editors and proofreaders to catch everything, and as this article from Publetariat points out, recent cuts in editorial staffing and changes in job description affect even the books put out by major publishers.
But you can do a lot to improve your manuscript. Here are a few tips, mostly for the proofreading stage. Big-picture issues are not addressed here.
1. Read your work out loud. (And don’t speed read.) This will help you spot missing words and letters, wrong inflections, and confusing phrasing.
2. Run a spell check for homonyms and other easily muxed ip words. You know the ones: their/they’re/there, here/hear, were/where, you/your/you’re. Check your thens and thans to make sure you’re using the right one; ditto effects and affects. If you know you struggle with certain words, run spell checks for those too.
3. Check names, especially place names, to make sure you always spell and capitalize them consistently. For example, if you’ve been calling that mysterious firewalking child “the ale boy,” don’t suddenly start calling him “the Ale Boy.”
4. Ask your friends to help. Chances are you have some friends who are good at catching errors, and some of them might be happy to lend their eyes. You should offer to do them a favour in return, of course.
5. Tighten up. OK, this isn’t exactly a proofreading tip — but the number one problem I see in amateur writing is a need for tightening. Be concise. Be exact. Say things only once. Don’t say “He dropped down to his knees in the dirt on the ground.” Say “He dropped to his knees.”
Have fun editing! I hope these tips are helpful to you.
