Proofreading and editing your own work–Another Tip That Works!

Those of you who have read some of my earlier blogs know that editing and proofreading your own work is a physical, organic impossibility (the brain is just wired that way), but we all try anyway. I’ve given tips in the past, i.e., “Read it on your Kindle with black background and white letters. Sometimes that will trick the eye and typos will pop! Spell each word individually…time consuming and you lose the momentum of the piece. Read it aloud and even record it. Then listen back to it; that sometimes helps.”

Now that the Kindle Fire HDX has a decent (pretty good) text to speech…let the Kindle read you your book, personal document, poem, business plan, etc., after you email it to your personal docs on Kindle. As it reads to you, follow along in large type. If the “computer voice” mispronounces a word, there’s a good chance the wrong word or a misspelled word is the cause of the problem. You also get to “hear” the verb tenses, pronouns (“he” becomes “she” way too easily), using the wrong name of the character, un-natural cadence that loses the reader’s attention and interest.

It helped me quite a bit in my last novella, STROKE OF SILENCE! Somehow in my file some silly editing feature was turned on so spellcheck didn’t work. So I proofread it by spelling out each word. I still missed way too many errors. (One is two many for me, but there were a lot more than one!)

Happy writing, proofreading, and use a professional editor if at all possible.

Just a thought. Contact me if you need any assistance. Questions are always free! lol

Deborah A. Bowman