I love watching The Joy of Painting at the end of a long day. Bob Ross is relaxing, entertaining, and has much wisdom to offer artists of all stripes. Near completion of a painting, one of his favorite bits of advice is, “Now, don’t fiddle this to death.” You risk ruining your happy little trees by endlessly tweaking and fussing over them. The same thing applies when we writers put on our editing caps. We second-guess word choice and sentence…
I haven’t seen the Nickelodeon show in decades, but hunting up these clips on Youtube makes me feel like I never stopped watching. It was a pleasant surprise to collide with an experiment that shows how important it is to slow down when proofreading! I’ll let Mr. Wizard and his assistant give you some other good tips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIWib5G-_lU Any proofreading tips you’d like to add? Share in the comments!
Pictured: my job as a business analyst. I’ve learned editing is a cycle of dashed hopes. “This next chapter won’t need much work at all- hooray!” Then I reread it, and uh-oh! Spider-sense tingling. A character acted dumb for the sake of plot, or something I thought would be good feels awkward. I always trust my niggling bad feelings. Time to reassess and rewrite. Again. Reluctance and dread soon pale against an escalating panic. What do I change? How? Is…
I’m in the throes of heavy editing at present, still trying to hammer out a process that works best for me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned thus far, it’s that even after you think you’ve gotten your prose as pretty as it can possibly be, there’s something wicked lurking in there to which you’re completely oblivious. One example is unintentional repetition of certain words and sentence structures. I didn’t know it until recently, but I abuse the hell out…