Since diving into the world of authoring books, I have developed my own four draft system when it comes to the actual books I am writing. “Mugged by Seagulls” was the first attempt at using this system and it worked amazingly well. I may not have published that work yet, but the draft system I used on it spilled over onto “The Caravan Chronicles” (TCC).
The biggest thing I have been doing over the last few weeks, or even months has been proofreading my work. I had two other people review the manuscript and provide feedback on both speller and grammar as well as some suggestions around clarifying certain points within the book. But even after having them gone through it, I have now re-read the book several times in an effort to fine tune it. Here’s a few things I discovered.
First off, and this is not an advertisement but just my admiration of the product, I love Grammarly. I’d seen the ads for it many times and finally decided to jump in and try it. It found a whole lot of things wrong with my final draft so I started digging more into it and found myself really agreeing with what it had picked out. It also made me realize that I was over-using certain words or phrases. Despite it being a great tool though, it also is just a piece of software so sometimes it just wouldn’t understand what I was saying in my writing and I’d have to tell it otherwise.
Beyond just spelling and grammar though, I did a 30 day membership to get the advanced features. That helped me find a lot of timing issues, and better words and descriptions for some of what I had written. For me, I feel like it really helped make my writing pop a lot more. Once I had this crossed off my list, I was pretty sure I was ready to send the book to be printed, but for some reason felt compelled to read it again.
Just over this past weekend, I did another pass at it and found a couple of minor grammar issues, but more importantly, I found myself referring to the same set of people in the same order. TCC tells the story of me and three other guys taking a road trip across the US. As I was going through the pages, I would find myself always saying the three names of my fellow travelers in the same order, and I also found that in some cases, I would use one person’s name more often than another. Given the trip was a balance between all of us, this review of the book allowed me to re-order some names from time to time, and throw in other means to make the book feel a bit more balanced across all of us.
Proofreading doesn’t have to be just about the spelling and grammar and punctuation. It can also be about balancing the book the way you want it, and perhaps finding better ways to illustrate the story you are trying to convey.
Feature Image by Howtospell.
