Proofreading 101
How to improve your story
When I graduated from college, the school I attended required two liberal arts courses from their school. I was a science transfer student who had completed all the necessary liberal arts. My final two classes were only due to this school’s policy. One was Psychology 101. Chapter five was about how the brain learned and the best way to study. It was ironic that my last college course taught me how to study, something I was never taught.
How many times have you experienced finding a better way to do something you been doing differently for years? Good ideas are in the having! One day you have a good idea. It is in this spirit that I write this story. I don’t read many “How to write articles” in Medium, but I read them occasionally. Often, I get an idea to do something differently, or to try something new, one more trick to improve my writing. This story is my contribution to that pool of information. I hope you find something.
I write with a keyboard and screen. I know writers who write longhand in wire-bound notebooks. I’ve read about writers and their typewriters, a tool a writer needed to be comfortable with before the computer age. Consider quill and ink! Would any of today’s writers be able to write with a quill? Not me. I would never be a writer if not for the computer, word processors, spell and grammar checkers. These writing programs provide the craft that takes years to learn. They are readily available to today’s writers. I am grateful and feel no less a writer using these aids.
The following are the steps I use to complete a story. One thing to know about my process is my writings are often for the newspaper where brevity is the gold standard. Brevity is good for my casual stories. I leave scholarly papers to others to describe.
The first step in every story is to get it on the page. I don’t use an outline, but I have a story idea before I start to write. I write in chunks, knowing where I want to get before I pause and consider the next. I edit as I write. Sometimes, I write a sentence and correct it. Sometimes my word processor highlights a misspelling, and I fix it. Sometimes, I type as fast as I can, changing nothing until I reach the desired endpoint. I then go back and edit spelling and typos. These are simple errors. Mostly, I’m completing the story.
When finished, I have my rough draft. Getting to the rough draft is about half of the work. Some say this is the best part, the creative part. For me, editing is the better part. As I reread and make changes, the story takes on its own life. Though still the writer, I become a reader, feeling the story’s flow. I forget what I meant and read what the words say. When editing, I make at least five passes through my story.
My first pass is for clarity and to catch my typical mistakes. I think every writer knows their own. For me, one is missing the s on third-person verbs, he say instead of he says, another is I write “the” instead of there or their. Spell check misses these. Clarity and brevity is my first objective.
1. I look at each sentence alone. It is hard to stop and consider only one sentence. The mind understands and wants to keep going. Is the sentence clear and concise? Does it only express one idea? I look carefully at every “and.”
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2. I look for words or ways to rephrase to make a smaller sentence. I remove every word and phrase that does not change the meaning. I eliminate most adverbs. (step 3). If I can make a ten-word sentence eight words, that’s good. If I can make it five words, that’s better. Best is to eliminate it.
3. I change adverb phrases like, “she said sweetly.” In the first draft, these are good because it captures your meaning. Now I look for the correct verb instead of modifying the weaker one. She cooed, or she whispered.
4. I adjust punctuation, spaces, periods, and commas, mostly commas. There are many comma rules, but I don’t think about the rules. I use the pause guideline. As I read the sentence, I ask myself, do I pause when I read this? For example, “As I spoke he listened.” I feel a pause as I say it. “As I spoke, he listened.” Also good is “I spoke. He listened.” (step 2). That may be too abrupt. Use the idea that feels best to you.
5. There is one great trick for comma, FANBOYS. For, and, nor, but, or, yet, so are often preceded by a comma.
6. The last thing I look at on my first pass is word choice. I do this on every pass. Find a better word. I change “he thought” to “he recalled.” Can a different word make this sentence closer to what I want to say? Sometimes, I leave a word alone, only to change it on a later pass.
7. On my second pass, I look at each sentence again, repeating step 1. This pass, I also look at the paragraph. Does it start and end on the same idea? Are all sentences about the same thing? Does changing the sentence order better develop the theme? I split multi-themed paragraphs into multiple paragraphs. Like sentences, short paragraphs are better than long ones.
8. My next pass is with text to speech (TTS). The wrong word can read okay. You think it is the right word. With TTS, it sounds wrong. After spell check, TTS is the best software tool I’ve found. MS Word has a text to speech feature, many browsers have one, and there are several free apps. I write with Word, so I use their feature. A Google search shows how to turn it on.
9. At this point, my story is good. Next, I use Grammarly, the free version. The rules of English have never been my friends. Grammarly steps my writing up a notch. In addition to Grammarly’s suggestions, I am tweaking words and sentences as the story’s feel becomes familiar.
10. My next pass is to print a hard copy. I proofread it with pen in hand. The story changes on paper. Now, I probably add more words than I drop.
11. There is one more step. I put the story down and wait twenty-four hours. Then, I reread it. Is it clear? Can I say it better?
12. Am I done yet? Almost. One more pass through Grammarly. It is easy to add an error when making a small change. Grammarly is always my final step.
I might make more passes through my story. The writer, like the artist, needs to know when to put the brush down. After the twenty-four-hour and final safety Grammarly pass, I’m comfortable that my story is clean. Now it’s all up to the story.
