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  • Katrina Crane

Editing Tips

As many of you already know, I work as a freelance editor in my free time. It’s a wonderful and rewarding job and I love reading the amazing stories my friends create. The problem is I have a difficult time turning off my inner editor while I’m writing my own stories. But while it can be incredibly frustrating at times when I want to just get words on the page, more often than not it pays off in the end. I never post anything I’ve written unless I’ve read over it at least three times. A bit excessive maybe, but I don’t have as many typos or incorrect grammar as I once did.

So, why am I telling you this?

Several of the people I have edited for in the past worry about how their writing looks without proofing. Many of them feel unsure of how to fix problems or even how to determine what the problems are exactly. In this blog post I will try to help by teaching you a few tricks to edit your own work so that you don’t feel self-conscious about silly things like typos and misplaced punctuation.

• Read your work aloud with a funny voice. You may think the funny voice is unnecessary; it isn’t. Do you remember in school when you had to read out loud from your textbook? Most of us just recited the words in a monotone, eager to be finished, and we rarely paid attention. There's no way you're going to catch mistakes if you aren't paying attention. By reading your work aloud in an accent or funny voice, you are forcing yourself to hear the words differently and you focus more on what you’re saying. Most of the time you will catch errors because your mind will stumble over them in an attempt to make sense of the sentence.

• Read each sentence backward. Believe me, it works. By the final stage of proofreading, you've become so familiar with your words that mistakes just slide right past you. Occasionally you will write a sentence with a duplicate word and not even notice it. By reading a sentence backward you catch unnecessary typos and anything that seems out of place. If you find reading backward to be too difficult or awkward, try reading everything as slowly as you can.

• Print it out. Reading words on a screen causes you to look at your work in a scrolling motion and it can become repetitive. By printing it out and turning the page, you force your eyes to only focus on one page at a time. (Not to mention you can mark that baby with all sorts of colors and sticky notes, which is one of my favorite things.)

• Use as few adverbs as possible. This is an important thing to keep track of because if you begin using adverbs all throughout your story you will get into the habit of “telling” instead of “showing” and bore your readers. A good way to cut adverbs is to run each chapter through an online editor like Hemingway Editor or Editminion, which will tell you how many adverbs you have used and will highlight them with a specific color. Once you know the number, try cutting that number in half at the very least.

• Pay attention to the mistakes you’ve made in your writing. You’ll find that you tend to make the same ones repeatedly. For example, one of the most common mistakes I make is misplacing commas and semicolons so the first thing I check when proofreading is my punctuation. Keep track of your mistakes and work on avoiding them during the initial writing process in the future.

I hope these tips help you when proofreading in the future. Try not to get discouraged when you find errors or typos. Every single manuscript in the history of the world has had them and no one writes perfectly. We all have specific areas where our writing can improve. And that’s the important thing, to never stop learning and always continue to grow as a writer.


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