Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Proofreading

Proofreading is my bette noir. It's much harder than righting writing the text in the first place.

I like to work in the createspace template just because I can see the pages add up as the words fly by. With most word processors you can display a couple of pages at once which helps with continuity and making sure there aren't plot holes at a local scale.  You know, avoiding things like:

p10  George entered the room and found Sally undressing. ...
p11 George entered the room and found Sally dressing.

Either he entered the room under potentially exciting conditions or he entered it after she was done waiting for him. It has to be one or the other. Well, I suppose we could have a "Schrodinger's plot", but that's usually a sign of lazy writing.

The trouble with a multi-page view is that the print is small and it's easy to miss typo's and homonyms (to,too and heel,heal).

What I've found helps is to zoom the page to where only a few lines are visible. It improves focus. It's still tedious, but at least it's harder to miss stupid mistakes.

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