Who proofreads your story? A word of warning to any new writer out there reading this - never think you can proofread your own writing satisfactorily.
After I have finished a story, I leave it for a day and then read it through again for any mistakes. I will often find things that I hadn't noticed the day before - a mistake in the punctuation or a typo that's slipped through when spell checking. I will then read it again and maybe find more things. At this stage I am convinced that the work is perfect with slip ups erased.
Do I then send the story off? Oh no. I learnt that lesson the hard way when having read through a rejection, found I had slipped from first to third person in the last paragraph. How I would have berated my year 6 for that crime!
My next step is to pass my work to my husband. I don't know how I would manage without his proofreading. Last night he read my finished story and said, "I like it, but who's Sam?"
"Why he's the main boy, the male love interest. who did you think he was?"
"I don't know," he replied. "But I do know that he used to be called Dan!"
He was right. When I looked, the boy was Dan for the first half of the story and Sam for the second half. When I had finished the story on the second day, I had obviously not checked his name. I had missed this glaring error at least three times.
The moral of this story: Never trust your own proofreading!
Who proofreads your work?
No comments:
Post a Comment