DYI Proofreading

In the previous post I talked a little about do-it-yourself editing. The topic for this post is DYI proofreading.

Much like editing, another set of eyes is essential to finding errors in my writing. In this regard, I’m talking about typos, missing words, punctuation errors, and so on. How many times have you read a book and found an error? It happens and it’s annoying. I expect a professionally published work to be error-free.

With First I did my best to scour out all the errors. Performing a complete self-edit of the manuscript multiple times helps, but it’s no guarantee of catching everything. One thing I did that I think I’ve mentioned before was to read it out loud to myself. Our eyes tend to fill in words or skip over spelling errors, but by reading the whole thing aloud I caught things my lying eyes missed.

Reading out loud also helped beyond proofing. It also helped me with the flow, transitions, as well as the speaking lines and if they sounded natural. The editing I did paid off to a degree since my editor told me it was one of the cleanest manuscripts she’d seen. Without the construction defects, if I can call them that, she was free to concentrate on the story, structure, and everything but typos.

Not that it was perfect. I will still need a professional proofreader before the book is published. When I let my wife read through stories I’m writing, she often asks if I want her to correct any errors as she goes along. I always tell her no since I know either me or a proofreader will find them later. I know I won’t find everything, which is why someone who’s a pro will do the final proofing. That way the readers won’t be distracted and it will actually look like a professionally published story.