Tag Archive for: Proofreading

Ugly Fonts Help Proofreading: M J Hyland

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via writing.ie

Here’s a great tip from M J Hyland, author of This is How and lecturer in creative writing at The University of Manchester. In a nutshell, she says:

Printing off your text in an ugly font will make mistakes show up more clearly.

The online magazine writing.ie expands on Hyland’s observation by quoting New Scientist’s explanation of how the brain reacts to different fonts.

Also according to M J Hyland:

When you’re actually writing, fonts can be a really useful visual way of distinguishing between different works or even sections of the same piece – sometimes if I’m moving between two projects (if I’ve just finished a first draft of something and am moving back to a previous project to edit, or if I’m taking a break from a novel to work on a short story) I put the two projects in different fonts so that as soon as I look at the screen I get a sense of which ‘voice’ I’m in.

I’m definitely going to take the advice on Ugly Fonts. Let me know if you’ve tried this before. Which is a good Ugly Font?

I realize I’m already doing as Hyland suggests with her second piece of advice. I’m currently redrafting a short story that I’m going to give away later this month. I’m writing this short story in Century Gothic instead of Times New Roman, which I used for drafting A Calculated Life. And the different font does put me in a different frame of mind.

 

Self-Publishing Tips: From Manuscript to Kindle

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So, your manuscript is finished (raise the flags!) and you’re ready to self-publish your ebook. You’ve already set up an account on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and you’ve completed all the information requested – book title, description, categories, verified your publishing rights.

Here are my hints and tips that should contribute to a smooth upload of your completed book. My advice is really aimed at other novelists rather than writers of non-fiction since their books have more complex formatting issues. And I took the simplest route, I believe, by preparing and uploading a Word document to the KDP website. (I won’t deal with the Front Cover upload in this blogpost). The KDP conversion process will produce a .mobi file, which you can download and check before you hit the Publish button. Read more

More Punctuation Malarky: A Crisis of Commas

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A passing remark on The Guardian Books Blog cost me dearly in woman-hours in the run up to Christmas. Blogger Alison Flood reviewed a self-published novel to test whether the online praise for the book was justified. (Mary Campisi’s A Family Affair – not my own cup of tea). I won’t present Alison’s conclusions, only her first comment:

First up, the commas. She employs the scattergun approach.

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Rethinking Em-Dashes and Other Punctuation Malarky

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Six pages into my manuscript, for the final (absolutely final) read-through before e-publication, I decided to check whether em-dashes require character spaces.

Here’s the two lines of dialogue that prompted this check:

‘You were worried. I wasn’t —’

‘I over-reacted. I didn’t mean it.’

but maybe it should be this:

‘You were worried. I wasn’t—’

‘I over-reacted. I didn’t mean it.’

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