Editing

You have to check for spelling even after using spellcheck because it want catch everything. Like if you write the word form when you actually meant to write from. And then there is words that sound the same but are spelled differently. I’m sure I don’t need to go into all the various spellings of words and that’s not the point of this article at any rate.

Grammar is the next thing that needs to be edited. I’ll be the first one to tell you that I really couldn’t everything about grammar, if anything at all. I tend to leave grammatical editing to someone else and allow them to tell me what I need to fix.

The next thing I edit is the flow of the piece. I pay attention to this part especially in my novels when it comes to dialogue. Dialogue needs to be natural like it is in real life. Now, I know that in real life conversations can be uncomfortable, and stilted. And you can have conversations like that in you story, just as long as you can make the reader believe it can happen. The narrative parts of the story need to flow naturally as well. If you doesn’t sound right to you when you read through it, then it most likely won’t sound right to the reader you’re tailoring the piece for.

I know that there are different people edit their work. Some just send it to a professional proofreader to mark up and then fix it when they get it back. Others do it themselves. I kinda fall in the middle. I like to edit my own work but I know that I will miss things. I miss things because I wrote the story and I know what I meant to write. So I see what I meant to write and not what I actually wrote. So I have someone else proofreader. I haven’t hired a professional proofreader yet. I normally turn to my husband, who tends to be the hardest on my writing. But I know he does this because he love me. I’ll also to turn to friends, family, and fellow writers where and when I can.

For the most part, I always write by hand first. I don’t normally edit while I’m writing the first draft. But there are always exception. If I find that something I wrote doesn’t sound write or doesn’t fit, I change it or take it out. Then I start editing when I type up my first draft. The typed version becomes my second draft. During my typing, I’m reading the words in my head, hearing how they sound and flow together. And I change what needs to be changed. I’ll do this as I’m typing. I very rarely rewrite the section by hand unless it’s a very large section. I’ll also add words that miss, take words out, fix spelling, and the likes.

Once I have it all typed up, I double-space the document and print it out. I find that I have made typing errors that must be fixed along with anything else I missed. And after I have read through this second draft and made the corrections I found, I print up a third draft and have someone else read it for me. Once I’ve made these corrections and I read through it once more, I finally feel that I have completed my end of the work.

And then it’s time to turn in to who ever is waiting on it.