Heroes Insider Weekly

Invisible Womans Internet tips

The dreadful process of editing.

A rule of writing, every draft needs editing. That’s why it's called a draft. My terms are draft, second draft, third draft, critiqued draft and fourth draft. Maybe one day it may change to complete. Maybe.

Most of my works on Wattpad are third drafts. No one sees my draft! Sixth Extinction is on the second draft stage with warnings posted on each chapter.

The process I’ve learned to go through is write. Leave it for a week. Sometimes many, if I’m lazy or busy. Place the section on MS Word and re-read it. Make changes as you go using the spell and grammar checker. Plus rewriting all sentences that don’t make sense.

The spell and grammar checker is not to be relied on! It tells you if certain words are incorrect or don’t work together. But it doesn’t pick up if they are used in the wrong context. Yes, there may not be any green or red swiggles under your writing, doesn’t mean the sentences make sense.

The second process requires internet and a handy program that picks up silly mistakes that your brain doesn’t.

Ginger is that program. It works with MS Word and many web browsers as a spell checker. However, what I like about the program is it catches mistakes like where/were their/there and other similar spelling mistakes that Word doesn’t.

The program is a little annoying for non US writers. You can’t change it to UK spelling!

Being an Aussie, some words have a grey/gray area where both are acceptable to use. Recognize this one! Or is it a ‘s’ instead of a ‘z’? I use ‘s’ to keep the spelling differences constant. So one must be careful when correcting with the program if the US dictionary is not the one used.

Again, not to be relied on!

Best thing to do with your writing while editing I found was to print it off. For some reason the eye catches more mistakes on actual paper than the screen. I don’t know why, but it’s true. And if you’re like me and only read every second word and skip the joining words, read it out loud to yourself. See how many mistakes you can find then!

Worried about paper and ink usage? Set your borders to minimum thickness. Drop the font size small enough not to make your eyes sore and change the line spacing to 1.5, so you have somewhere to scribble notes, and print your work double sided.

It is better than any editing program I can recommend.

A few handy sites which taught and help me to edit are:

Ginger

http://www.gingersoftware.com/

Works with internet browsers, android, iOS and MS Word.

Is free, but only for some time. And had many ads and prompts to upgrade to the paid version.

Trick: Don’t let it change the words for you in MS Word. Find the offending mistake yourself and change it. It will stop the ‘you only have so many more corrections, to keep using this product, purchase the premium version’ ad.

Writing Aid Pro

http://prowritingaid.com/

I love this site. It requires sign up, though it is well worth it! It doesn’t send nasty newsletters to clog up your inbox either which is great!

Copy and paste your text into this site while editing and it will give you a list of different things to avoid within your writing such as; clichés and redundancies, overused words and repeated words and phrases.

It also gives ideas on how to improve dull paragraph structure, readability and keeps your work consistent of spelling, hyphenation, and capitalization

After using this site, I became aware of what I was writing during the draft and think my overall work has improved.

Word Hippo

http://www.wordhippo.com/

Word Hippo is an online page that finds similar or opposite words. It’s a handy program for discovering other words to use in place of the ones you use too much.

It can also be used as a thesaurus and dictionary if need be. It’s also great for finding rhyming words, discovering name origins and meanings. It can even translate them into other languages.

Another handy tool is discovering the word forms. Can’t think of the tense spelling. This site has it covered.

Word Web 5

http://wordweb.info/free/

This dictionary/thesaurus isn’t a web based program like the others, but a downloadable program. It works with any other program with a highlight of words and a few selected keys. It is the best thesaurus ever! It’s also great for when you can’t think of that elusive word to write. Type something similar and go through the list much like you can do with word hippo. It also gives you the meaning of the word so you know you have the right one, plus similar spelt words just so you can make sure.

This program runs in the background and comes forward when needed. Saved my brain a few times from going insane trying to think of the proper word to write or a different word as ‘cringed’ had been used far too many times!

That’s the websites for this week. Next week I’ll be writing about sites that help with what to edit since there is way more to it than changing a few words around and smoothing out sentences and spelling mistakes.

@ConniByron