Articles 20VN | Maintaining Perspective - The Key to Success in ...

One of the best kinds of opportunities the Internet offers in opportunities in working from home lies in the writing trade - blogs, articles, posts - writing of every kind. There is one problem that most people face exploiting this profitable earning avenue though - there is quite no faster way of being sent away empty-handed than sending in spotty work that has careless grammar and typing mistakes scattered about. Anyone who tries to gloss such a problem over saying that a couple of mistakes in an otherwise wonderfully written piece, shouldn't really matter, should just think about how writing like this would look to a trained eye. To a professional editor who's spent his whole career training his guns on grammar and typing errors, editing and proofreading mistakes can stand out in the most clear way. So clearly in fact, that all the beautiful writing imagery that a writer has worked hard to put in a manuscript is easily marred by just a handful of mistakes. Skills in editing and proofreading are just as important to the budding writer as an active imagination and a thirst to put it down on paper.

As important as editing and proofreading are though, there is a time and place when they are best done. Setting down a first draft of a work is a time any writer needs to concentrate on the creative writing process. This wouldn't be the time to bother with niceties in typos and mistakes. Grammar mistakes, punctuation errors - nothing matters when you're in the heat of putting your ideas down on paper before they disappear. Have you ever seen a 'The Making Of' special on TV about a movie? Movie directors show no respect for the sequence in which scenes in a movie will appear. They'll shoot portions first that appear in the end; they will shoot repeated takes and keep them, mistakes, bloopers and all. It's when they've done all the work that they try to put it all together in a smooth and mistake-free sequence. Writers adopt the same methods themselves. They write whatever portion they feel like, and keep any mistakes, all as part of the creative process.

To catch grammar and usage errors requires a great grasp of how mistakes, if left in, can change the entire meaning and intent of a sentence. You need to be able to read a sentence both in context and then free of its context to be able to tell how accurate the feel of the sentence is. And then of course, spell checkers can only help so far as you wish to avoid typing nonexistent words. Since any language has lots of words that have multiple versions with the same sound, spell checkers can only go so far in helping you. Having an unshakable grounding in spelling will always help.

Catching every mistake comes easily to you when you put little distance between your work and yourself. There are many ways in which you psychologically achieve this. Print your manuscript out on paper and use different-looking fonts and print colors to trick your brain into reading it afresh. Always read your manuscript out loud when you're engaged in editing and proofreading. Reading out loud always helps you find out when something doesn't sound natural. There are lots of great manuals of style out there that help in the whole editing and proofreading process. They make for a great education too.

Source: http://www.20vn.com/writing-speaking/maintaining-perspective-the-key-to-success-in-editing-and-proofreading-bcf.htm

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