Training the eye: What to look for when you start editing

Hi guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. I had a lot of fun last month, telling you guys a bit of what goes into writing a series of standalone novels—and this month, I’ve decided to talk about editing.

The ins and outs of editing, what you need to look for while you’re editing, and what you need to train your eye to find throughout your editing process. Really, that’s a lot of what editing is. It’s training your eyes to find the errors, even when your brain doesn’t necessarily want to see them. After all, your brain knows what you wrote, and knows what your sentences are meant to say. So it’s your eye that needs to find the errors, without too much effort (or else editing may give you a literal headache).

Today, we’ll look at the most basic of things you need to train your eyes to find:

Grammar, Word Usage, and Sentence Structure

Obvious, yes? But these are some of the hardest things for your brain to find. Like I said, your brain knows what that sentence is supposed to say, and so automatically reads it the way it was meant to be read. Your eye must therefore be trained to read the sentence no matter what, and spot the errors within it.

Let’s start with Grammar.

If you’re not good at grammar, then I suggest you learn. Most editors won’t touch a book until you’ve been through it at least once yourself—primarily because we editors don’t want to have to fix allllllll your silly grammar mistakes the first time we read through your manuscript. We’d much rather be able to focus on the big things, the plot points and the story changes that need to be made, than checking to make sure you’ve written your words in the right order.

If it helps, use your spellchecker. Sign up for Grammarly or some similar program to help you spot the errors in your writing. The more you’re drawn to the errors in your grammar, the less you’ll write them in the first place.

Word Usage

I mention this one primarily because we, as writers, tend to get in a rut. We have our favorite words, and we like to use them as much as we can—as often as we can. But there are certain words that draw reader’s eyes in a weird way, in a way that says, “I don’t see that word very often, that’s cool,” until they’ve seen it eight times in a ten page span in your book and start wondering why they've seen it so often.

Train your eye to scan for words you’re using too much, words you might be overusing—especially the ones that draw the eye. For me, it’s words like “myriad.” I love that word. I’d like to use it a lot more than I do. Unfortunately, it’s one of those words that’s not said aloud a whole lot, and so readers start to notice a pattern if it’s written more than a few times in an entire book.

Your eye must know to look for things of this nature. Look for repetition of the words "of" and “that,” both in everyday speech and in your writing. You’ll be surprised, how much it’s overused.

Sentence Structure

This one is the bane of my existence, and I’m still working on it. Vary your sentence structures, please. Don’t write the same sentence over and over, using different words. Try new things. Add fragments and run-ons when necessary. Try not to bore your reader by using the same structure time and time again.

I’ve gotten to the point now that I can find them. I can see when I’m repeating similar sentence structures and need to fix it. The hard part is knowing how to fix it. I'm still working on that.

And that part, my dear writer, is on you, too.

[love]

{Rani Divine}