Where does everyone go to get their stories proofread? I have people who are helping me throughout the process, but I want to know who everyone uses. Plus if I know of someone who has written books and have had them published would that person be a good choice? Just curious. Also, if you don't have any money to pay someone to proofread, what can you do?
I paid a grad student to proof read before sending mine out to betas and critiques. Once the critique process was finished I paid a professional copy editor to clean it up before I submitted to a publisher. Even then the publisher said it could still use a little more editing. (I think that's because I undid a good deal of the copy editor's work because she also made a few structural suggestions that made a lot of sense, so I went back and "fixed" those bits.) Fortunately, when you get to that point editors are provided for you.
I just dont make misstakes In reality, I've discovered my notion of my own limitations has proven to be on the optimistic side. So I've taken the route Homer's trodden for a couple of recent pieces. I'll pm you the email addy @Sam Webb to do with as you wish. It was quite a revelation when they (the proofreader) came back, with seemingly vandalised copies of my work. But (for me, my flawed self) very worth it as near all the suggestions were improvements. I was close to opening an account with them in order to polish a lot of stuff I've 'published in haste' in the past. But luckily have been saved from the expense by a learned, qualified volunteer.
If you don't have money for a proper proofreader, I suggest you join (or form) a writer's club in your area. In return for proofreading your books, you are obliged to proofread theirs. Your local library or community college should be able to help you in making contact with them.
The best way to self-proofread (and yes, it can be done) is to turn on your 'invisibles' in the view menu of your wordprocessor. Then bump the font size up to huge, so you are looking at sentences and phrases and punctuation, not a whole paragraph or page, etc. This way you won't get absorbed in reading the story, and instead will be looking at things up close. When you find your attention flagging, then stop. Go away and do something else for a while. Then return. This isn't creative work, this is just work. But it's also easy work. You'll be surprised at how quickly you can get it done, once you get going on it. This up close method is for proofreading, though, not editing. Editing must look at how the story flows, find where the plot holes are, check for all sorts of story-related errors, and to some extent errors like verb tense agreement, etc. Proofreading is basically looking for spelling, punctuation and spacing errors. Proofreading is the last phase of your pre-publication/submission process. Do the editing first.
OMG! I have this problem all the time, I get sucked into the book. I've never considered doing this. Great tip.
I have an English professor that I trade stories with who looks at my stuff. He loves Grammar; I love story structure.
One Self-Published book on Amazon Kindle. One review. He wasn't a big fan of the book, but said at least it was edited!
I'll give it a shot. Does it work for missing words too? If you can't see the whole sentence at once, if you're looking at it instead of reading it, do you realise if a word is missing? I find that missing words are the hardest to catch. We fill the blanks in our minds. Edited: Oh, nevermind, you said "looking at sentences". I thought the "huge" font was bigger than that. So, how to catch missing words? Ideas?
I would also like to add to the discussion that I've NEVER read a book that didn't have several typos on it. Even old school books from respectable publishers, way back when books were edited by at least two different people. And typos still made it to the printed version (there was no other version, by the way, and they were printed by the hundreds at the time, no print on demand either!)!! Readers are forgiving of typos if they realise clearly it's not a spelling/grammar mistake. (Let's just say that typos are not the thing that keeps me awake at night thinking how crappy my writing is. )
Yes, you will catch missing words as well. By 'huge' I didn't mean one word per screen, but I meant something a lot larger than what you'd read in a book. This below is an excerpt from my novel, in 20-point, showing the blue 'invisibles' which will catch spacing errors.
@jannert Thank you for the font size example. Now that I think about it, I don't know. It hurts my eyes and it can be distracting. Today I tried one of those "text to speech" sites online and the robotic voice was more distracting than useful. I couldn't stand it for more than two sentences. What usually works for me is to read a paragraph "out loud" in my mind, with fresh eyes, and do it several times during the editing process. It will take me at least two months to acquire these "fresh eyes" between each reading but it's the best I got.
