Thursday, May 23, 2013

Secret to Proofreading

Secret to Proofreading by Lisa Rayns.

We’ve all seen reviews that say, “This book had a lot of missing words.” Even though the author hired and paid an editor to make sure their work was error free, they still wind up with these types of reviews. Why? Because going through 80,000 words is time consuming and editors have lives and a list of priorities of their own.

NO ONE will care about your work as much as you do.

You’ve spent months with you manuscript, reread it several times, and probably even read it out loud. Isn’t this enough? No, because our eyes see what they expect to see. I’m not going to bore you with the explanation of this. If you’re a writer, you know what I’m talking about. That’s why we have beta readers, in hopes of catching errors we can’t see in our own work. That’s still not enough.

I recommend you try this little trick on something that has been through editors and beta readers, maybe even those works that you’ve already published. You’ll be surprised that you still find errors. The silver lining is that you know they’re there and can now fix them!

Here it is: The SIMPLE secret to Proofreading to really make sure your book is error free.

Save your word document as a PDF file. Open it. Click on View > Read Out Loud > Activate Read Out Loud.

Put on headphones and listen to your story. I go through mine paragraph by paragraph, and even if I’m reading along, my ears will still catch things my eyes miss.

Listen carefully for odd sounding words. Ex: “lose” or “loose,” “decent” or “descent.” I find it also can help decipher if a comma is needed or not. 


That’s it. Fix what you need to fix and send it to the publisher.

Happy Writing!

If you’ve found this helpful or have other suggestions to add, please leave a comment and let me know!

Lisa Rayns

11 comments:

  1. I had no idea you could do that with PDF files. Of course, I'm not a writer, so it's not like I would need it much. Still, that is a great idea.

    Pam

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    1. It really works amazingly well if you take your time. Thanks for stopping and becoming an awesome follower too!

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  2. Awesome tip :) Another one that helps me is looking at the book in an e-reader rather than as a WORD document. I was surprised at how many errors I found in my latest novel this way.

    Thanks for posting! Does Adobe read out loud?

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    1. Yes, changing the font helps too. Yes to your question. Thanks for stopping!

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  3. Does it have to be Adobe? I've already used my three free chances of converting and would have to subscribe in order to create more PDFs. I'm kinda nervous to subscribe.

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    1. I'm not sure what you mean. My adobe reader download was free and a Microsoft Word Document can be directly saved as a PDF. You shouldn't have to convert it. If you don't have MS office, I'm not sure what to tell you. I recommend getting it. :)

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  4. Great idea Lisa. I was listening to my Kindle text to speech the other day, and thought to myself that it would me a good way to "listen" to my manuscript for errors and flow.

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    1. Oh, I wish I had a kindle! I heard nooks will read to you too. Sadly, I don't have one of those either. Damn the luck.

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  5. Brilliant idea, Lisa. Thanks for the advice. I'll definitely do that with my next MS. :D

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  6. I tried this and it works great! The flat computer voice slays sexiness. LOL

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  7. The monotone voice helps to isolate things you wouldn't otherwise notice. Great tip! I never would have thought of this.

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