Running your Spellcheck is not enough

Spellcheck and grammar check are the obvious first steps self-editing your book, but these don’t do enough heavy lifting to improve the readability of your content.

When you write nonfiction, you have to make sure you’re explaining your concepts and ideas with enough clarity to keep your reader’s interest. If your book is difficult to read, chances are your readers will give up on you as an author, and your books.

I’ve been huddled away at my Mum’s house in the U.K. for the past four months, waiting for my chance to get on a plane and travel again. During this time  I’ve been working on three active book projects, and one of them is now in the self-editing phase.

It’s a non-fiction book called Fast Drafting for Travel Writers, and is the follow up to Freewriting for Travel Writers.

Before you send your book to a proofreader you have to make sure it’s sufficiently edited, and there’s more than one way to approach this integral step in the book production process.

Professional vs. Self-Editing

To fine-tune your manuscript for readability: you can either pay a professional editor to review your book, or do as much self-editing as you can.

PROFESSIONAL EDITING OPTION

If you don’t have the time or inclination to self-edit, by all means engage professional editing help. For nonfiction books there are three key types of editing that are applicable:

1. Structural Edit
2. Line Edit
3. Copy Edit

1. Structural Edit

A structural editor looks at the big picture and how your content is organized to ensure to improve the chances of you book keeping your reader engaged.

2. Line Edit

A line editor looks at the content and flow of your writing, and focuses on the style of your content rather than the mechanics of it, and suggest ways to strengthen your writing and resolve descriptive inconsistencies, or problems with point of view or mixed tenses.

3. Copy Edit

A copy editor helps create the most readable version of your book. As well as reviewing spelling and grammar, they focus on consistency and repetition, to improve the clarity of your writing.

People often use the term line and copy editing interchangeably, but they’re not exactly the same. It’s possible to get an editor to do both as there is some overlap between the elements they look at, but there’s also editors who specialize in one and not the other.

For more information about the different types of editing, check out this Reedsy Article.

SELF-EDITING OPTION

Self-editing takes more time and effort, but it costs a lot less money. It also helps to improve your writing for the next book you write. Each round of self-editing you do teaches you a new insight and raises your awareness of the English language, and you can incorporate those lessons into future writing. That’s why I prefer to do numerous rounds of self-editing, and just work with a proofreader to give it the once over before I publish.

I use a proofreader who also includes a review of the mechanics of writing and points out when a sentence doesn’t read well or there’s inconsistency in my writing. He’s not a copy editor, so doesn’t offer a solution, but it’s a good final check by someone who isn’t familiar with my niche.

Self-Editing my Book

I use Scrivener to write all my content and use their label function to keep track of the status of each section. While my book is a work in progress, it’s always an erratic combination of labels, and each section is usually at a different stage of completion, in the process of nudging them towards the Ready to Self-Edit stage.

I love speed writing the first draft of my books. I set myself a broad outline, and then freewrite my content. By the end of the first draft I have the guts of a book, but it’s usually a bit of a shambles, and I have to spend weeks, sometimes months polishing these initial versions into something cohesive, well-organized and readable.

The last step I do before changing a second from 2nd Draft to Ready to Self-Edit, is to listen to my content.

Listening Instead of Reading

In Scrivener, I use the Edit>Speech function to have the computer read my book to me. When you read your content multiple times, eventually you get to a point that you’re not actually seeing every word on the page, and you skim over some words and its so easy to miss grammar or wrong words. Hearing your content read out loud is very different from reading to yourself in your head.

I like listening with my eyes closed, because then I’m fully tuning in the sound of the content, and cutting out any visual stimuli. When I do this, it’s easy to identify wrong words, misspelled words, or clunky grammar. The areas that don’t flow stick out like a sore thumb. It’s also a great way to catch repetitions or confusing explanations.

Tip: I use a Mac, and in the Scrivener Edit menu is a Speech option, and a computer generated voice reads my content. In the settings menu you can change the nationality and sex of the speaker – I opt for a British female. The voices are quite realistic and not jarring to listen too.

In previous books I’ve stopped the speech function when I’ve not like what I’ve heard, and edited the sections that need tweaking. But for this current book I tried a different approach. When I hear words or sections that I know needed editing—I quickly highlight them.

I used a two-color approach:

• words, sentences or paragraphs that needed editing, in one color
• text that seemed to be in the wrong place in another color

By the end of the first round of self-editing, my book was a colorful collection of sections that I could instantly pinpoint what action I needed to take. I work to resolve each of these issues until I’m happy with them, and give them one final listen using this speech function.

No matter how much writing and rewriting I do in Scrivener, there’s always a lot more revisions to do when I get to the self-editing stage. But once all of my book sections have been tagged with Ready to Self-Edit, I close my file in Scrivener, and open it up in my self-editing software, ProWritingAid.

I’ve used different editing programs over the years, but I prefer this one because it integrates with Scrivener. You can work on the same file in these two different programs (but you have to close it in one, before you open it in the other).

Self-Editing in ProWritingAid

Each round of self-editing solidifies the content structure, and just as I think I’m about to wrap up my edits and send the book off to be proofed, I have an epiphany about the structure that would improve the organization, or I think about additional content that would add clarity to my topic. This realization triggers another round of new content creation, which means another round of editing.

I have a love/hate relationship with these break-throughs. On one hand, I’ve been working on this book so long and so intensely that I’m getting a bit fed up with it and I just want to wrap it up and move onto another project.

But after the initial disappointment of having to do more work on the book, I get an intense feeling of satisfaction that the changes I’m about to make, will create a better book.

I’m always eager to get this editing phase completed as quickly as possible, but it usually takes longer than anticipated. Editing can’t be rushed if you want to publish a good quality book you’re proud to put your name too.

READABILITY BY PARAGRAPH

My first go-to report in ProWritingAid is always the Readability by Paragraph. I aim to have a good mix between easy-to-read and slightly difficult-to-read paragraphs, and my goal is to eliminate all those that are tagged as very difficult-to-read.

When I worked my corporate job I did a lot of report writing, and the culture was such that most of us had the same approach to content creation:

1. Use lots of industry jargon,
2. Create long sentences packed with information,
3. Throw in advanced vocabulary to sound smart.

This approach wows effective in that role, but it doesn’t work for authors trying to write books that readers find approachable and easy to understand.

I always start my self-editing in ProWritingAid with this readability report, because I know it’s an area that needs attention. I want my books to be easy to read.

That doesn’t mean that I’m dumbing them down, it just means that I want the concepts and techniques I’m sharing to be understood easily, so that my reader doesn’t get frustrated with my book because it’s too complex or difficult to understand.

In my earlier books I used to have a higher percentage of red and yellow sentences, but as I’ve written more books, I’ve become a better writer, and now when I open my books for the first time in ProWritingAid, I have less very difficult sentences to edge toward simplicity.

I was happy to see that only about 14% of my sentences were considered too difficult.

With this report, I’m able to navigate through all the paragraphs underlined in red to rewrite them to make them easier to read. I also take a look at the slightly difficult to read paragraphs and make sure I’m happy with them the way they are.

Long and windy sentences often just need a revamp from corporate speak to day-to-day speak. When I look at this content I realize that I wouldn’t say these things if I was talking to somebody face to face, so I make those edits to simplify the language.

The other step I take is to simplify my vocabulary. You don’t have to use complex vocabulary to prove that you’re intelligent or an effective writer. The idea is to simplify it, not dumb it down to the lowest common denominator. If you do nothing else but improve the readability of your content, you’ll improve your book ten-fold.

ProWritingAid doesn’t offer you the solution, it just points out the areas where there’s an opportunity for improvement. So resolving the difficult to read paragraphs is a trial and error process. It can takes a couple of tweaks to make it easier to read. Sometimes it requires a complete paragraph re-write, and other times it can be resolved by splitting the paragraph up. Through this self-editing process I’m learning and developing my writing style and adding clarity to my books. My goal at this stage of the editing process is to eliminate all the difficult-to-read paragraphs.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that in order to showcase your expertise, you have to write something that reads like a text book. But readers in your niche who want to learn, want content that is robust and informative, but also easy to understand.

If you have the time to self-edit your books, I’d recommend this approach. It’ll save you money, and improve your writing.

Joel Friedlander’s Carnival of the Indies

This article appears as a Featured Post in the August 2020 Carnival of Indies compiled by The Book Designer Joel Friedlander. Make sure to visit this post to read all the other content Joel featured this month. There’s such a broad scope of tips and advice shared each month, you’re bound to find an article that will enlighten your indie author journey.

Read more articles in my How to Write a Travel Guide Series