May 20 2009
Sir-Edits-alot
How many times can one edit a 3,500 word story? Apparently, for me, 3,500 times is nearing the sweet spot….
How many times can I read and re-write a short story and still find errors? After the first couple of edits the errors switch from glaringly obvious to the ninja mode.
Missing punctuation, over punctuation, and incorrect punctuation check! Past tense, present tense, wrong tense got ya! Oh darn, wrong word, run on sentence, or debilitating extra words snuck into the fray.
Few things spell, like a spell checker, and one of life’s truly interesting pastimes is getting it to realize that too separate words don’t make one write. Argument is futile, you will be assimilated.
Formatting is another gifted entity that often assumes it has the only correct answer. Typing merrily along only to find it auto corrected after 3,500 words is a joy you have to experience firsthand. Tag lines on dialogue that it capitalized are lots of fun, and the find function useless, unless of course you care to re-edit to look for all the uncapitalized he’s and she’s that it will unerringly switch to lower case in its quest for perfection, again.
Few things say I love you like having someone point out another simple error after the fifth edit… One thing is for sure, a monitor is really hard to light on fire in a fit of anger.
Thomas H. Forthe
I feel your pain. I have a love hate relationship with my Microsoft Word program, and everything is read 3-4 times while editing. The biggest problem is in words that were omitted the first time are likely over-looked the second, third, fourth, and sometimes the fifth times…if it weren’t for mistakes, I could not write…LOL…enjoyed your piece on editing.
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