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Manuscript by Seth Sawyers
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A recent SCBWI Q&A session with professional editors confirmed a poorly presented manuscript was one of the biggest mistakes they see. To kick off our Everything Editorial month, professional proofreader Catriona Tippin shares her top tips for polishing your novel before submission.
Get in the Mood Put your work to one side for a while. Don’t attempt to proofread immediately after writing The End with a flourish. Your creative brain isn’t the same as your proofreading brain, and you need to be in the zone.
Hard Copy Some prefer to proofread a printed copy, this may work for you.
Margin Call Read through, make corrections and remember to ‘Save’. Then change the font size, or the margins, and read through again. Typos hide at the beginnings and endings of lines, so changing the font size or the margins will flush them out.
Typos hide at the beginnings and endings of lines, so changing the font size or the margins will flush them out.
Organising and Analysing v Organizing and Analyzing Use your Spellchecker function, but remember it will probably suggest American spellings: theater, mold, jewelry, etc. Your Spellchecker may offer the American spellings of organize, analyze, etc. This may be what you want, but don’t mix with the UK English use of organise, analyse, etc. The choice of ‘…ise’ or ‘…ize’ is up to you – just be consistent. Most British publishers use ‘ise / yse’. British newspapers and the BBC use ‘ise / yse’. If you’re using Oxford spelling, as used by Oxford University Press for historical and etymological reasons, then it’s ‘ize / yse’. I prefer ‘ise / yse’ as it’s conventional in the UK and looks better in the usual fonts. . Using the UK spelling also means you can use your ‘Find’ function to look for ‘ize’ and if it isn’t in ‘size’ ‘seize’, ‘maize’ or ‘capsize’… it probably needs checking.
On Your Own? Read your work aloud. This helps find sentences that need shortening and/or dividing. Obviously, if your WIP is a picture book rather than a lengthy novel, you’re a winner here.
Read your work aloud.
Search and Ye Shall Find Use your Find function to look for your weaknesses. We all have regular mistakes, for instance typing ‘adn’ for ‘and’. When typing quickly I find I type ‘webiste’ for ‘website’ and ‘inovice’ for ‘invoice’ (doh). If you finetune your ‘Autochecker’ function you can pick up your regular typos, but nothing beats a painstaking readthrough.
Greengrocers Apostrophe’s Use your Find function to look for apostrophes and check them. Check all your possessives – ‘the greengrocer’s apostrophe’, ‘the cat’s whiskers’, ‘the footballers’ wives’. Check all your contractions – ‘don’t’, ‘won’t’, etc. Regular typos I see include ‘you’re’ for ‘your’,’ it’s’ for ‘it’s and ‘they’re’ for ‘there’ or ‘their’. Find and check.
!@&!#?!Use your Find function to look for exclamation marks and think about them. Colin McNaughton’s Preston Pig can get away with ‘Suddenly!’ and ‘Boo!’, but exclamation marks can nearly always be deleted. Your writing should get the reader exclaiming, not the punctuation.
Use your Find function to look for exclamation marks and think about them.
Facts Facts Facts Check your facts as well as your spelling and grammar. You can use Wikipedia, but only for the links to actual sources listed as footnotes in each entry. Yes, you need to scroll right down the Wikipedia page to the small print, follow those numbered links and check them.
Increase Your Wordpower Consult style guides: Times, Telegraph, Guardian – they are all available online. They are helpful for established opinions on usage, spelling of controversial words, use of hyphens, etc.
We hope you've found these suggestions useful. We'll be posting more of Catriona's tips on a monthly basis.
Catriona Tippin has been a member of SCBWI since 2006 and helps organise venues for SCBWI North East. Details of her writing and illustrating
here. She proofreads study guides, house magazines and publicity material for two national educational charities, in addition to working on a variety of proofreads and copyedits for the growing self-published world. Her monthly column is intended to give you food for thought, remembering “Any correction of the speech or writing of other will contain at least one grammatical, spelling or typographical error” (McKean’s Law, named after its inventor Erin McKean, editor of the Oxford American Dictionary).
Tania Tay is an ex-advertising copywriter and has been published in Sable LitMag. She is writing MG and YA fiction, and is on the editorial team at Words & Pictures.
