This made it look as if I had pulled it off the shelf at Books-A-Million and was flipping through the pages. I even cut out and stapled the pages so it looked like a minibook. Years ago, I changed the first chapter of my book into the same font and page size seen in paperbacks. Seeing your manuscript turned into something approaching the finished product gives you a fresh way of evaluating your work. While I wouldn’t recommend creating ebooks to sell-we’ll get the whys of that later-it’s perfect for revising your work. Most fonts adjust the size of the letters so that thin characters-i, t, 1, and ‘-take up less room than wider characters such as W, O, and Q.Ģ. That means that each character occupies the same width on the page. It is also unique in that it is a monospace font. Courier looks similar to what would come out of a typewriter. If you didn’t write it in Courier, change it to that, bump up the text size, double-space the manuscript and print it out. Alter its appearance by changing the font, text color, and text size. Here are some of the methods I’ve used:ġ. If you don’t have the time, there are other ways to distance yourself from the manuscript. This will give you the distance you need to see the story as it rests on the page and not in your head. Put it away and pull it out later, maybe a month if you can afford it. The first thing you need to do is give yourself enough time to forget the work. So run the manuscript through the checkers, and if you think it’s a weakness to admit you use it, don’t tell anyone. Learn proper grammar, and next time you’ll know the right word to use. Pull Fowler’s off the shelf and look it up. Do you really need that fragmented sentence? Should it be was or were there? If you don’t know, educate yourself. Because what grammar-check does is educate you as to why you’re making choices. It can’t determine whether you’re using a word correctly or not. Most of the time, you’ll ignore its suggestions. There are valid objections to using grammar check. I have to put it on my production to-do list. Not using it is also so common a mistake that even experienced copy editors like myself forget sometimes. But it’s your first line of defense against 1-star Amazon reviews. Yes, spell-check is not perfect neither is grammar-check, although I think you should use that, too.
#New oxford picture dictionary monolingual how to
I can anticipate your eye-roll from here, like a 14-year-old girl (“DA-AD! Of course I know how to use spell-check.”) I’m not talking to you, unless you aren’t doing it in which case I hope you can envision me face-palming myself. It can also be the place to hide facts, such as important clues in a mystery.īut before you begin the revision process, I want you to do something. The middle of the sentence is where mistakes hide. They tend to read the first half of the sentence, then skip over the middle and absorb the end. Since you wrote it, you already know what is there, or what you think there.ĭid you catch the missing “is” in the previous sentence? If you did, congratulations! If you didn’t, you just learned a lesson about how people read. You’re approaching your work as a reader would be seeing it for the first time. Revision uses a different set of muscles. Stephen King calls it “writing with the door closed,” and it’s such an effective metaphor that it’s been used ever since. You’re telling a story, and that involves creation and imagination. It involves you sitting at your desk and pumping out the words. It’s difficult to learn, because it’s a different skill set from writing.
Writers have a blind spot when it comes to revision. But I do have a couple technical points about revision that I want to say.) (I swear this is not going to turn into another how-to book on writing.
0 kommentar(er)
