I was just wondering, for those of you who write constantly, is there a set way you edit that seems to help you catch your mistakes best? How do you edit? Have you found a way that just seems to get out the glitches for you? Please share! I'd love to know.
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What I find helps me is when I read it out loud. It catches things that may not sound great and I feel get a lot of typos fixed doing that too because I have to actually look at all of the words to read them out loud. When I read silently I tend to glaze over words.
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
Have someone else read it. Sometimes you read things they way you want them to be read. For example, if you forgot the word I, your brain reads it like there is an I in there because that was how you intended it.
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. -Catullus, Carmen 85
Put the story to one side and forget about it for a while, and then come back to it in a few days/weeks. That always helps me to catch errors. But like others have said, reading aloud and having someone else read it are both really good ways to edit a piece.
I close my eyes to see a sight ahead,
An everlasting dream,
That makes me wake to find myself
In my own eternity...
1. Get another person (preferably someone with a mild interest in writing like your dear self) to look at it.
2. Use spellchecker/grammar functions on Word (bit mechanical, I find, and annoying when you just know your work is deliberately incorrect to achieve a certain effect)
3. Take a break and come back to your work after a few weeks (the longer, the better)
4. Set aside a specific working slot just for editing.
"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." William Faulkner.
Do you do poetry? Check out Poetry Inspiration over in Groups!
Print it out. Nothing is more eye-catching than a hard-copy of your story. Having somebody else read it is a good idea, but not so great if you're not ready for foreign eyes to see the work of your blood, sweat and tears. I like to print it out and mark up the paper until the ink weighs it down so heavily that it's annoying to read.
Reading it backwards is an interesting approach... I'll have to try that.
