MAKING THE EDITING PROCESS EASIER

One of the biggest problems when self editing is that eventually you see only what you want to see. In other words you become blind to all those glaringly obvious little errors on the pages of your manuscript.

One way to overcome this is to have several copies to work from. However, they mustn't be merely clones of the original or this system won't work. In addition to my master copy (Times New Roman, size 12 font, double spaced, 3rd person past tense) I have a copy in book format using a CreateSpace 5x8 template. I also have a third copy, also in book format using a Createspace template, but this time it is written in first person past tense.

Each version is sufficiently different from the others that issues not immediately obvious on one version become so when I switch to a copy written in a different format. There is however, a downside in that changes made to one version also need to be transferred onto the others.

Last month I worked through my MS using my master copy. Each time I changed something I highlighted the changes in yellow before moving on. At the end of the month I looked at the changes I'd made and if they were still valid I altered  the other two copies of the MS accordingly. This month I'm working through the MS using the version in first person past tense and next month I'll be using the copy in book format written in 3rd person past tense.





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