Homepage
Login
New Post
Profile
Listen to a text-to-speech program read your work to you. The nice thing about those programs is their stupidity -- whatever you wrote, that's exactly what they read. If you have a word twice in a row, most humans will skip the repeat and never notice. If you leave out a word, most humans will supply it and never notice.
Do a repeated find on commonly mixed-up words, like "there/they're/their," "your/you're," and "its/it's." Verify each time that you are using the correct word. (You can get a personal list of these bugaboo words by searching for "commonly misused words" or "commonly misspelled words," and eliminating the ones that you know you don't mix up.)
Run spell check! It is inexcusable to have blatantly misspelled words in a MSS that you're submitting to someone -- even if it's your editor -- since it's so easy to run spell check. Don't waste other people's time. Even if you're paying them. (Especially if you're paying them??)
Ditto for grammar check. Even though grammar check is not as reliable as spell check, you should still run it. Make sure that any/all grammar flags are either false positives (i.e., not actually bad grammar) or are purposely breaking a grammar rule for effect (and BTW don't do that too often). Again, don't waste people's time.
Read each paragraph, one by one, and ask yourself: "Is the first sentence a proper leading sentence for this paragraph?" If not, fix it, or fix the paragraph. In most writing, especially non-fiction, you should be able to get the gist of a MSS from only the leading sentences of paragraphs.
MS Word has something called outline view. This can be very useful for getting your thoughts organized and ordered (and keeping them that way), especially for long, complex MSSs. If you have outline view available (or something similar), I suggest you figure out how it works and use it.
(0)More posts by @Bryan361
Terms of Use Privacy policy Contact About Cancellation policy © selfpublishingguru.com2024 All Rights reserved.