Editing 101 – Page 2 – Deborah Shaw Adventure Editing

Benefits of working with a human editor

Automated grammar and spelling tools can help improve your writing, but there are still benefits to working with a human editor (like me!).

When you work with a human editor, you benefit from our encouragement, suggestions, queries, and experience.

Is that creature venomous or poisonous?

Knowing your venomous creatures from your poisonous ones will go a long way in building trust with your readers. Using the correct words shows you know what you’re talking about.

What does editing look like?

If you’re nervous about having an editor review your work, you’re not alone! Sending your manuscript to someone you’ve never met is daunting. What can you expect? What will they change? What if you don’t like their changes?

What are style guides and style sheets? (And do I need one?)

Style guides are tools editors use to help ensure consistency throughout your novel, thesis, or document.

Style sheets are tailored to a specific project. They condense the most important parts of a style guide into a user friendly document.

How to proofread your own work

You don’t always have the time or luxury to pay for a proofreader so here are two tips to help you proofread your own work: listening and checklists.

How to delete multiple spaces

File clean-up is an important part of the editing process. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of editing a document, I run a handful of global checks. One of these is searching for and deleting multiple spaces. To save your editor time, and you money, try and delete these extra spaces before you send your file to them.

Great books about writing and self-editing

My favourite books about writing and self-editing

How to keep headings and body text together

If you’re already using Word Styles to format your documents, great! Here’s a trick that will help you get more out of Styles and improve the look and layout of your work. By modifying Word styles, you can avoid leaving your headings hanging at the bottom of a page, like this: Note, I’m using WordContinue reading “How to keep headings and body text together”

What kind of editing do I need?

There are, broadly, three types of editing: developmental editing (also called content editing), copy editing, and proofreading. Developmental Editing Developmental editing looks at the structure of the whole book. Suggestions are made to improve the clarity, flow, and style of the overall work. While this can be time consuming, it is great to have anotherContinue reading “What kind of editing do I need?”