March 2021

Fool-Proofing Part 3: Free Editing App Treatment

Hey there, writers and readers. Welcome back to the third part of the “Fool-Proofing” Guide. In the last part of the guide, we went over the process to ensure consistency and continuity throughout your prose, and the first 3 steps of the Fool-Proofing system. In the third part of the guide, we will go over giving your writing an editing treatment using two free editing software apps.

Side Note: I use Google Docs, and the directions for this guide uses images within the GDocs processor. However, the process for Word or other processors is similar.

Free Editing Software Apps:

  1. Hemingway Editor
  2. Prowritingaid.com

The Hemingway Editor

As you can see from the image above, the Hemingway Editor boasts several areas of editing: 

  • Readability
  • Adverbs
  • Passive voice
  • Complex language
  • Hard and very hard sentence constructions

Unfortunately, I find all the functions besides the “adverbs” and “passive voice” distracting, rigid, and potentially destructive to your editing endeavors. For example, when I first started using it, I found myself butchering hard/very hard sentences (color-coded yellow and red) in an effort to shorten the sentences and appease the app. Don’t do this. It is a waste of time and will potentially strip your sentence of its spirit. There is a much better way to trim and tighten your writing, which we will get into in Part 4 of the guide.

The reason I use the Hemingway Editor is specifically for Adverbs, which are great tools in your syntactical arsenal. They can liven things up and drill home a feeling you are trying to convey. At the same time, they are ridiculed and reviled throughout the writing world. This can be confusing and contradictory. 

Such is life. 

The complaint with adverbs come from not their usage, but their over-usage. An simple way to conceptualize the argument is by thinking of a recipe. For example, let’s use a pot of stew (hint: the stew is your writing). A key ingredient in the stew is salt to bring out flavor (hint: the salt is adverbs). Well, you like flavor, so you continue to add it. Unfortunately, there comes a point where this good thing that made your stew delicious now has ruined it. In fact, when someone tastes your stew, all they can taste is salt. Not the beautiful cuts of sirloin you so carefully browned, nor the veggies you spent all day slicing and dicing. Nope. All it is now is a pot of salty tongue scalding sludge. The same is true for your writing. This is why I use the Hemingway Editor to track these potential overuses down.

Step 4: Checking for Adverb Overuse with the Hemingway Editor

  1. Simply go to The Hemingway Editor. It works better to open it in a new window because we will go back and forth between the editor and our document. It looks, as of this writing, exactly like the image below.
  1. Copy your document either manually: Highlight and (Ctrl+C) OR (Ctrl +A) to highlight the entire document.
  1. Once copied, paste your document into the Hemingway Editor. 
  1. The Hemingway Editor will analyze your document and each area of concern will pop up in a specific color. 

Again, while I think the Hemingway Editor was a unique and novel idea, (it uses Hemingway’s own work as a filter to analyze your own) I find it overly rigid and critical. 

I mean, if you want to imitate this dude, go right ahead. Whatever quivers your liver. As for me, I’ll stick to using it for easy tracking of adverbs and also to make sure my use of passive voice is minimal. However, I think the next step works better for that.

  1. Alright. Now that the adverbs are highlighted in blue, analyze each adverb for its necessity. 
  • Does it really need to be there? 
  • If you take it away, does the meaning of the idea change? 
  • Does the flow of the writing suffer or improve with or without it? 
  • Is it a crutch word?

Side Note: DON’T EDIT IN THE HEMINGWAY EDITOR!!!! 

If you change something within the editor itself, then copy and paste it back into your document, the Hemingway Editor’s formatting will come with it. Meaning, your own formatting will be stripped. This will be a continual issue as we move forward with the last few steps of the Fool-Proofing system and can lead to frustrating results. Therefore, since you are only using the editor for adverbs, locate the blue color-coded adverb you want to kill. In this example, “lavishly” then use (Alt+Tab – if it is in a different window) to quickly switch back to your open document. From here, use the search function (Ctrl+F) and input the adverb.

Delete the unnecessary adverb, then switch back to the editor (Alt + Tab) and continue to analyze your document for the necessity of each adverb, deleting where needed. 

Awesome! Done with step 4 of the Fool-Proofing system. On to step 5!

Step 5: Using Prowritingaid.com 

Prowritingaid.com is a massive time saver! However, it can also be a massive time suck as the app has A LOT of functionality. Although, I feel most of it is completely unnecessary, and as far as the Fool-Proofing system goes, we’ll only be using the basic functions.

  1. Head to Prowritingaid.com. The basic app is free to use, but you will need to sign up before you can use it. Once you have signed up, login and you’ll be brought to the screen below.
  1. Simply copy and paste your document into the editor and it will magically analyze your writing for a host of grammar/usage/stylistic suggestions. I want to emphasize not to go willy-nilly with the editor’s suggestions as some will be incorrect OR will mess with your stylistic choices. For instance, in the image below, it has marked a name as an error. While the editor is really quite comprehensive and an amazing tool, it does have faults.
  1. Go through your document and check for grammatical and proofing errors.

Side note: THE EDITOR SCREWS WITH YOUR FORMATTING!!!!!

As you can see from the image above, when you paste your writing into the editor, it removes indentations AND screws with the line spacing as can be seen in the image below. This is stupid and annoying and I have not figured out a way to prevent it from doing it. Unfortunately, this means when you are done using the editor and copy and paste your edited writing back into your original document, you will have to manually correct the formatting. 

  1. Once you have copied and pasted the now edited version from the prowritingaid editor into your document, highlight everything either manually or with (Ctrl + A). Once it’s highlighted, click on the line spacing icon like in the image below. Click on “Single.”
  1. Next, within the same “line spacing” menu, click on “Add space before paragraph” option seen in the image below.

I don’t know why Gdocs does it, but you will have to choose this option twice. The First time it won’t do anything, as there is already a space added to the paragraph (at least for me). After you have chosen the option once, the same option will instead say “Remove” instead of add. Now do the same process for “Add space after paragraph.” Alright, you’re set. Let’s move on to fixing the indentation.

  1. To fix the indentations of your document, navigate to the “format tab” then choose “Align & Indent” then choose “Indentation options” like in the image below.

From here, you will be prompted with the window below.

Set the left and right fields to 0, then select “First Line” from the drop-down menu. I prefer my indentations at .2, but it’s up to you if you want them at .5. Click apply. 

Now every line in your document will be indented. Make sure to fix the very first line in each scene within the document, as that should not have an indentation. 

Nice! You have completed Step 5 in the Fool-Proofing system and the last step of Part 3! You should now have a reasonably polished document. However, there is one last step in the Fool-Proofing system and the most important, which we will get into in Fool-Proofing Part 4: Line Editing and The Secret Technique.” Until then, happy writing and word wrangling!

What you can look forward to in this guide:

Fool-Proofing Part 1: Intro and the Psychology of Typos

Fool-Proofing Part 2: Editing Checklist, Style Sheet, and Cheat Sheet for Continuity

Fool-Proofing Part 3: Free Editing App Treatment

Fool-Proofing Part 4: Line Editing and The Secret Technique

Fool-Proofing Part 3: Free Editing App Treatment Read More »

Fool-Proofing: A Guide to Self-Editing for the Monetarily Deficient Indie Author – Part 2: Editing Checklist, Style Sheet, and Cheat Sheet for Continuity

halloween, infinity, infinite
Continuity and Consistency is Key

Heyo writers and readers. Welcome back to the second part of the “Fool-Proofing” Guide. In the first part of the guide, we spoke about the need for editing and the major blockade that comes with self-editing—generalization and the psychology of typos. In this part, I will take you through the process I use to ensure consistency and continuity throughout my prose as well as the first 3 steps I use for Fool-Proofing.

 

To start off, let’s go over the tools I’ll be talking about and using for this part of the guide.

  1. Cheat Sheet
  2. Style Sheet
  3. Editing Checklist
  4. Grammarly

Tool #1: Cheat Sheet

Efficient editing starts before you finish a piece of writing. A novel is a container for a massive amount of data arranged into conceptual ideas/concepts. It’s a lot to keep track of and the best way to do this is a cheat sheet/style sheet as you write the novel. There are many ways to do this, but I find a document arranged into tables that I call my cheat sheet the easiest and most time-saving. It’s easily accessible and contains important details in categories. For example, we can see part of my cheat sheet for Future Furious to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

The table in the image above is specifically for characters, but the cheat sheet also contains a table each for.

  • Places: With subcategories for places in the city, the planet, businesses, etc…
  • Products: With subcategories for drugs, drinks, tech, food, vehicles, etc…
  • Phrases / Jargon / Vernacular: With subcategories for insults, Southernisms, etc…
  • Events: With subcategories for holidays, wars, operations, etc…
  • Species: With subcategories for insects, animals, flora, etc…

All in all, it’s a vast collation of terms and important ideas that are easily accessible that you will continue to fill in as you write for continuity purposes. This is a massive time AND frustration saver, and I highly recommend every story have one. While I don’t specifically use this cheat sheet as an actual step within the “Fool-Proofing” system, I still end up using it for quick reference when I’m editing, which is why I am including this as a tool.

 

Tool #2: Style Sheet

While the cheat sheet is a massive time saver for when you are actually writing the novel, it differs from the style sheet I use when I get down and dirty into my editing phase. However, the process is still the same as the cheat sheet. I keep this document open as I’m writing the novel and when I come across something I’m not sure how I want to spell or name or whatever, I quickly add it to this list to make sure I check it for consistency during the final editing process. This happens when something doesn’t feel quite right and I check a style guide or an online resource, or when I want to change a character’s name or a place halfway through the book. And sometimes, if it is pertaining to grammar or mechanics, it comes down to personal style choice. For instance, are you going to use a space after your ellipsis… or…no space? Well, there isn’t really a right answer. However, there is a wrong one. And that would be to use a space after some ellipses and no space after other ellipses. When it comes to style, CONSISTENCY is the name of the game. Some common things I add to my style sheet are: 

  • Words that have a funky spelling or have more than one spelling.
  • Names (especially if changed or uncommon)
  • Terms
  • Style (Like the aforementioned ellipsis)
  • Dates and Times
  • etc…

Side note: There are different ways to create style sheets. In terms of what you should use, it really depends on what works for you. I find my approach easy, quick, and accessible. Maybe not super pretty, but hey, it works for me and that’s what matters. If you want to do it a different way, more power to you.  

 

Tool #3: Editing Checklist

Part of the editing checklist I have specifically compiled for myself I actually came across at https://jerryjenkins.com/self-editing/. As this isn’t my actual work, so I will not explain it in detail but strongly suggest checking it out or downloading it for free.

While this guide has many delicious editing nuggets to check for, and what will be useful for you specifically is user-dependent, what I use from it is:

  • Delete up and down, except where necessary.
  • Delete that, except when necessary for clarity.

Side note: On my actual checklist document, I have other nuggets from this guide. However, I use them as reminders as something to keep an eye out for in the further steps of this guide as opposed to issues I will actively search a document for as we will do in steps 2 and 3 below.

 

Along with these items, I also use a list of trouble words excerpted from the first chapter of Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing that I ran across on The Write Life. Depending on your grammar proficiency, you may want to expand this list. However, I find for my purposes, this list is perfect.

  • a lot/alot
  • affect/effect
  • can/may
  • further/farther
  • good/well
  • i.e./e.g.
  • into/in to
  • it’s/its
  • lay/lie
  • less/fewer
  • that/who
  • their/they’re/there
  • then/than
  • who/whom
  • your/you’re

Alright, now that we have our tools ready to go, let’s get into the first few steps of the “Fool-Proofing” system.

 

Fool-Proofing: Step 1 – Spell Check!!!

Open your document (I highly suggest one chapter per document for organizational and ease of use purposes). Once open, use the free Grammarly app! It’s incredibly useful AND free! (It’s not gonna solve all your editing problems, which is why this guide has 4 parts, but it is an incredible tool as seen in the image below.)

 

Give your chapter a once over with the app then move on to step number 2.

 

Fool-Proofing: Step 2 – Checklist

Step number 2 is easy-peasy. For this step, you check your checklist for the first item and use your word processor’s search function (Ctrl + F) then systematically check for each issue. In the picture below, we can see a very rough draft I’m working on. By using the search function, I have instantly located all the instances of the word down in the document. If I were editing this, I would examine each instance and quickly analyze it for its necessity. If it’s unnecessary, delete it. If it is necessary, there might be a better way of conveying the idea you may want to use. This is up to you to decide (see what I did there?). 

Once you’ve gone through each instance of up and down, move on to the next item on your checklist. In my case, I would check all instances of that for necessity. The process is the same, use the (Ctrl + F) search function and input that into the search field, then analyze each instance. Which, in many cases, is just not needed. However, don’t just delete all instances of that as sometimes it is necessary.   

From there, move on to the trouble words list and keep moving down the items of your checklist until it’s finished. This might take a bit of time for the first couple of chapters. But after a few, it’s relatively quick and then you can move on to the next steps for Fool-Proofing.

 

Fool-Proofing: Step 3 – Style Sheet Consistency

This is essentially the same as the previous step. However, you are using the style sheet as opposed to the editing checklist. The process is the same, use the search function and systematically move down the item list of your style sheet to check for consistency/continuity of the words/names/terms/style/dates/eye color/etc… you previously committed to using. 

Side note: I started out doing step 3 for each chapter, but it soon became a time-consuming chore and an unnecessary one at that. Due to this, I now save this super important step for the very last step of the editing process after I have collated all the chapters for either each part of the book or the complete manuscript into one document. This way, I am not checking every chapter for the fifty or more items. 

Nice! You should now have a document that is consistent and ready for the next two nitty-gritty steps in the process, the free editing app treatments.

 

That’s the end of Part 2 for the Fool-Proofing guide. Join us next time when we dive into “Fool-Proofing Part 3: The Free Editing App Treatment.” Until then, happy writing and word wrangling!

 

What you can look forward to in this guide:

Fool-Proofing Part 1: Intro and the Psychology of Typos

Fool-Proofing Part 2: Editing Checklist, Style Sheet, and Cheat Sheet for Continuity

Fool-Proofing Part 3: Free Editing App Treatment

Fool-Proofing Part 4: Line Editing and The Secret Technique

Fool-Proofing: A Guide to Self-Editing for the Monetarily Deficient Indie Author – Part 2: Editing Checklist, Style Sheet, and Cheat Sheet for Continuity Read More »

Fool-Proofing: A Guide to Self-Editing for the Monetarily Deficient Indie Author – Part 1: Intro and the Psychology of Typos

keyboard, apple, input
Greetings fellow readers and writers! 

Today I thought I’d write about something that has been on my mind lately. Self-editing/proofing for the indie writer. This will be a four-part guide and while I’d love to jump right into my “fool-proofing” system, I feel a brief exploration into the psychology of editing/proofing is in order. Therefore, this first post will concentrate on why editing and proofing are important, especially for a new author, and why we are incapable of seeing our own mistakes even though they are right in front of our eyes. 

Note to readers: This guide is specifically for copy/line editing and proofing. Not for editorial/developmental/structural editing.

Why Editing and Proofing are Important:

It should come as no surprise that as a writer, I spend a lot of time reading. Well, it so happens in my continuous quest in marketing my work, I have been reading a bucket load of other indie books. While I have found some new authors who have really put an effort into editing/proofing their novels, I’ve also run into more than a few with glaring issues throughout their entire novel. Now, I’m not talking about a few errors throughout a book. This is expected even in high-profile traditionally published novels. It happens, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never read a book without at least one or two errors. That’s all well and dandy. What I’m talking about are books that the author has published with an error or more on every single page!

This is problematic for several reasons:

  1. The loss of immersion as a reader is taken out of the story by a glaring typo/continuity error/grammatical sin.
  2. The loss of “flow” in cadence and structure, but also the experience.
  3. A loss of respect. If your work isn’t polished and professional, you have not taken your own work seriously. Why should the reader take it seriously if you, the creator, have not?
  4. Losing the reader forever. Honestly, I feel my time was wasted trying to establish what these authors were attempting to convey through the muck and mire. It also took much more effort to read than needed because of it. They wasted my time because they didn’t put in their own time to make sure it was ready. I can guarantee, with all the writers and books out there to choose from, I won’t be picking up another of these author’s books. 

While it seems common practice within the writing world to insist that self-editing is unprofessional and if you want to be a serious writer, you need to hire an editor. This argument holds merit in terms of the limitations of a writer to actually see their work (more about this coming up), but I disagree with the idea that a serious writer cannot self-edit/proof their own work. 

I will state a disclaimer right now before I ruffle too many feathers: Hiring a professional and high-quality editor is absolutely worthwhile. Especially as it frees up time for the writer to concentrate on content creation and can also establish a great working relationship while providing a powerful source of learning. However, I refuse the idea that to be a professional writer; hiring an editor is necessary.  

As an indie author, I consider myself a professional, and the work I put out to the world polished and of high-quality. Due to this, and the fact I was indeed monetarily deficient (Straight up broke, son!) I took it upon myself to develop an economic and efficient system for editing Future Furious in a way that allowed me to make sure I would not fall prey to the dreaded psychological effect of generalization.

What do I mean by generalization? Excellent question my savvy reader! 

The Psychology of Typos: 

Generalization is the common phenomenon that happens with higher-order brain processes when your brain is sacrificing detail for the sake of using less processing power. A good example of this is when you look at a tree. Your brain is not detailing every single leaf on those branches. That would take a massive amount of processing power and would be extremely inefficient. Interestingly, I have read that this process has been linked to the Default Mode Network or DMN (your ego), the part of the brain responsible for tuning up performance and creating automaticity for everyday tasks, and also the part of the brain that researchers believe psychedelics shut off. 

Whoa, man! Those leaves are so… GREEN! 

That’s right, they’re so green and detailed because you are actually seeing them for what they are without the DMN’s generalization interference. 

Well, the same thing happens as a writer. When you write, you have created essentially a map of meaning on paper (or screen, or what have you) as well as one within your mind. As you scour your writing for mistakes, your brain is essentially overlapping this actual map and the mental map. Because of this, you are literally incapable of seeing typos in some cases because your brain is showing you something different from what is actually right there in front of you. 

Pretty crazy, right? 

It’s the reason I would harp on my students to always have someone else read their work before handing it in, and/or read it out loud (a technique we’ll get into in later parts of this guide), and/or even better, have someone read it to them out loud. This is the psychology of the typo, and in order to make sure your editing efforts are not in vain and your passionate, amazing story is polished and shiny, there are really only two routes available.

  1. Hire an editor.
  2. Use a systematic approach that will allow you to bypass generalization. 

The problems I have with hiring an editor/proofer are:

  • Anyone I would trust to do the job to my own professional standards will cost more moola than I’m prepared to throw down at this early stage in my career. 
  • Anyone who would do it on the cheap, I cannot trust to do a better job than myself. Therefore, if I hired someone, my overly neurotic self would just end up combing through the writing anyway while relentlessly tearing myself down for wasting money that could have been better spent elsewhere. You know, like a sweet cover design… or Funyuns.

While I am looking forward to the time in my career that I can responsibly hire a brilliant editor, in the meantime, I am more than happy with my systematic approach, and I am confident in its effectiveness. I also feel that by using this approach, I have a better understanding of my own writing and personal style by being so close and intimate with it. Self-editing has given me insight into what I do and why I do it. 

Interestingly, I feel this draws a parallel with generalization and the DMN. When we write, when we practice the act of writing, there is automaticity to it. That automaticity is what the DMN is specifically in charge of and designed for. However, when you delve deep into what is actually going on with your own writing and process, deconstructing and reconstructing, you really get a look at the nuts and bolts beneath the surface. Finally seeing what’s really there. To give you an example of one of these nuggets of wisdom I found within my own style, I tend to use language to convey that things are moving together and happening simultaneously within the story. This I feel works really well to convey a sense of cinematic scope and movement within the writing and while I’m certainly not the only writer to do this, I feel the realization has brought me closer to my writing, to the story, and even to my characters. Just knowing I lean on these types of structures allows me to analyze and evaluate on a deeper level than if I were just doing it automatically.

That’s the end of Part 1 for the Fool-Proofing guide. Join us next time when we dive into editing checklists and manuscript cheat sheets. Until then, happy writing and word wrangling!

What you can look forward to in this guide:

Fool-Proofing Part 1: Intro and the Psychology of Typos

Fool-Proofing Part 2: Editing Checklist and Cheat Sheet

Fool-Proofing Part 3: Free Editing App Treatment

Fool-Proofing Part 4: Line Editing and The Secret Technique

Fool-Proofing: A Guide to Self-Editing for the Monetarily Deficient Indie Author – Part 1: Intro and the Psychology of Typos Read More »