Moon Dragon Says Edit Yerself by @Angela Stevens562
Hunting For Inconsistencies:
M: Hello Hawkeye, I’m back!
Moondragon realizes the room is empty. She scans under the desk and looks in the closet. Hawkeye is nowhere to be found.
M: Hmmm, now where could he be?
She slumps down at the computer and taps her fingernails on the desk. An orange post it note is sticking to the monitor.
WHAT’SUP MOONDRAGON! Soz. I have only a 10% chance that I will B back anytime soon, I have gone to watch some paint dry Er mean, have gone to the Dentist. The guy who is my dentist says I will be a while because he has to drill, polish, and torture me. Um, then I realise I have to collected something in my pickup. I have to get a settee, table and chairs for my Mum. Poor love, mum is getting on she is 55 now. IDK when I’ll be back, cos the pick-up is unreliable. I realize you have stuff to do so don’t bother to wait. Do not worry you can lecture me another time, lol.
Hugs, Hawkeye.
Moondragon puts her head in her hands.
M: God-damn-it Hawkeye this note is terrible! It is full of inconsistencies.
Somewhere across the city Hawkeye is oblivious to the inconsistencies in his note writing, he is in fact enjoying ice-cream with a rather nice blonde.
M: Okay folks it looks like it is just going to be me talking to you today. However, Hawkeye has given me an idea for our subject in this next installment of Edit Yerself.
When I finish writing a manuscript one major part of my editing regime is to hunt out inconsistencies and fix them. Now inconsistencies in my work fall into two categories- structural and plot driven. Today I am going to look purely at the structural inconsistencies we all make in our work but that we need to fix for our stories to look clean, tidy and professional- and more importantly so we don’t piss off our readers who can, lets face it be anal about such things.
So as Hawkeye has left us this little treasure trove of inconsistencies lets take a good hard look at some of the problems within his note.
1. STYLE FORMATTING
2. SYMBOLS/ ABBREVIATIONS
3. NUMBERS
4. PUNCTUATION
5. VERSIONS OF ENGLISH
6. CAPITALIZATION
7. HYPHENATING
8. TENSE
9. SPELLING
10. CONTRACTIONS
Yep that is some list!
The bad news is: I have found at least 10 examples where Hawkeye has been inconsistent in this one paragraph.
The good news is: They are all really easy to check for and hunt out.
Compared to a lot of editing tasks each of these things are pretty quick fixes, you just have to know what you are looking for. For a lot of them you can even use the find and replace function on your word processor to help you out.
So lets take each of these problems one by one and understand what they are…
STYLE FORMATTING
YOU ARE READING
Heroes Insider Weekly
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