When we have finished writing our novel or academic work, we face the next phase. to the correction phase. Of course, before sending our text to the proofreader, we can make it the simplest way and review it ourselves, basically because it is ours, because we are writers and to give it the touch of coherence that we want. I am aware that a writer does not have to know certain rules and uses of a professional proofreader, but he can review, with these tips, his style and message.
Study The Entire Process
If you want what you have written to be effective, you should not only pay attention to the final result. You must start reading from the beginning, doubting the words you have put, if they all have the intention you want, since if you change any of them it may mean restructuring the sentence or the entire paragraph. There are times when there is cacophony in a sentence, not only is it enough for me to write a synonym for one of them, you have to erase and focus the idea in a different way.
Detect Errors
Oh the mistakes ! You can read the text twenty times, and not discover that huge agreement error or that accent on a mono syllable that is slowly killing you but you don’t realize it. Many times errors go unnoticed, but not only spelling or style, but also content. I am going to give you an example, in a novel that I had the opportunity to correct, I realized that whenever the protagonists prepared food, it was pasta. It seemed that there was only pasta in the world. Hey, not a bad plan, but our diet is made up of more foods. The writer needs someone who judges the most hidden aspects of your novel with a critical attitude and looks at the spelling, vocabulary, fillers, topics, organization to see if it conveys the right idea.
Put Yourself in The Place of The Reader
Unless you are a writer who wants to keep his novel in a drawer (there are many drawers who love reading, don’t think), your work is for an audience, an audience with a certain age range, a receiver with a certain intention .
Therefore, when we read the text, we have to do it as if we were a reader outside the writing process. We have to take into account their knowledge and circumstances. It is not the same to describe a town in Mongolia (in which we have not been and many words will be unknown to us) than the white towns of Cádiz, to which we can «put a face». And writing an essay about the wetlands of Spain has nothing to do with writing a novel where the wetlands of Spain have a background; in the latter case, the vocabulary will not be as technical.
Make Summaries and Outlines
This idea reminds me of what we used to do in college. Outlines, summaries and more outlines and more summaries of the notes to synthesize the key ideas. Well, the same thing happens with this. It is good to repeat a thousand times in your mind the sequence of events in your novel.
First this happens, then this and then this, and that in each transition there is a clear justification. The easier it is to summarize it, the more coherent it will be. You will only be able to tell if it is an orderly and clear text by doing so. You can apply this technique in a text or in paragraphs that you find a bit cumbersome and you need to focus it on a basic idea with a title and subtitle if we are talking about an academic work. If it is a novel, many times it will be necessary to take that summary as a short story within the plot.
Read out Loud
Although it may not seem like it to you, the text changes if we read it aloud. By giving intonation, we look more at the possible cacophonous errors that may exist and that go unnoticed in a silent reading. Also the punctuation, the pauses that we can make, the internal rhymes or the repetitions. And that without counting the interventions of the characters if we write dialogues.
Do Not Trust The Word Corrector
That’s how it is. It is true that when we write typos with a word processor , misspellings , gender matches, number usually appear underlined in red or blue, and some errors are corrected automatically (for example, the computer changes * trash for trash if we have it configured like this). Certainly, it is a very useful tool, but we must not forget that it is not a person, and only we know if we want to put a loss or a loss ; give or from , for example. And it may happen that our processor does not correct all the misspellings and in the end we print: * and gone home my mother; but not only that, it can change a word automatically without us realizing it, think of the automatic WhatsApp corrector, because the fun is served.
So far, some tips. But, remember, it is important that this is the previous step before sending your text to a professional proofreader and Book Editor. Only he can get you up to the liver of what we have written: style, spelling, make a reading report, etc. Do not be scared, but do not present your writing in any way, you are writers, you know what a dictionary is and that there are writing rules. Cheer up with it!
