Keyboard users should learn to touch-type. You don’t need to buy special teaching software and you should be sufficiently proficient in a fortnight. Don’t procrastinate: just do it!
Know your operating system and your word processor — intimately. If you’re serious about your writing, you should be serious about your writing tools.
Take special care with your choice of typographic characters. A common error is to use a left opening quotation mark instead of an apostrophe at the beginning of an abbreviation: they are mirror images of each other, and you need to know your word processor operation and font character sets in order to generate the character appropriate for the situation. Another mistake is to use quotation marks to indicate minutes or seconds.
Never string spaces together. Learn to use rulers instead.
It is generally easier to find mistakes in a paper version of a manuscript than it is to find them on screen.
Don’t rely on “spell-checkers”, especially if you are a creative writer. Use a dictionary: you learn more. Besides, spell-checkers can give both false positives and false negatives. For example, a spell-checker may not flag “in-appropriate” as an error, even when it all appears on the one line of text (ie, without text wrapping to the next line after the hyphen).
Be consistent. This exhortation covers a multitude of sins. One important application is with respect to styles and format. Unless you already know a publisher’s requirements, you don’t need to follow a particular style guide slavishly. As long as you are consistent in your approach (eg, regarding the formatting of reference citations or the use of single or double quotation marks), regular expression parsing can be employed later to transform the document so that it complies with a particular publisher’s preferences.
Learn about regular expressions and how to use them, especially if you write academic or technical material.
When doing a global Find and Replace, be careful about what you think you are finding and what you think you are replacing it with!
Save often.
Backup often. At this stage of computer evolution, USB sticks are wonderful.
Choose your writing instrument with care. It will become your best friend, so it should be a joy to pick up and work with.
Choose your paper with care. A lot is riding on it. Make sure your paper and your writing instrument are a good match. The motor aspects of writing should be a pleasure, not a chore. Don’t allow a scratchy interface between the two to interrupt the flow of thoughts from brain to paper. For most of us, cost constraints will force a compromise on the lushness of the paper we choose.
Think of the future. How long do you want your original manuscript to last? Pencil will prove disappointing in the long run unless the written work is sprayed with fixative to prevent smudging. Many inks will run with dowsing and/or fade with time. (This applies to computer printer inks as well.) Some papers will yellow over time, some encourage foxing. Choose archival inks and paper if longevity is important to you.
While the cut-and-paste technique for reordering parts of a manuscript did not originate with computers and word processors, the latter technologies make it so easy that they alone account for the abandonment of handwriting by many authors. But it is perfectly possible — and, some would maintain, desirable — to produce a manuscript in the “old-fashioned” way, at least for the first draft.
To illustrate this point, I describe one method of reordering on paper that doesn’t require the use of scissors. With an ink of a different colour from the main text, indicate the (revised, as distinct from original) order of a piece of text by placing a circled number immediately prior to the piece in question. This obviates the need to use grandiose sweeping circles and arrows that may transcend page breaks. The result will look something like this:–
➀ text_fragment_A ➂ text_fragment_B ➄ text_fragment_C ➁ text_fragment_D ➃ text_fragment_E
The original sequence of text fragments was: A, B, C, etc. The revised sequence is: ➀, ➁, ➂, etc. So, in this example, text_fragment_C has been demoted from third to fifth place, while text_fragment_D has been promoted from fourth to second place in the sequence. To read the reordered manuscript, one starts reading at “➀” and continues reading until one meets a circled number. One then searches for “➁” before resuming reading, and so on in an obvious manner. Especially when it is enhanced with a couple of tricks, this method often permits easy reading through of a reordered manuscript, even when the manuscript is lengthy and the reader is someone other than the author.
Consider storing your paper manuscripts in a fireproof safe or cabinet.
Think before writing. Try to plan the work, then write the first draft in sequence from beginning to end, rather than in a piecemeal fashion. This helps to attain a more even style throughout the work. More importantly, it helps to achieve the pace you want. (Note: By using the term “the pace” I do not mean to imply that pace is necessarily uniform throughout the work.)
Keep asking yourself what you are assuming the reader knows and whether the assumption is reasonable.
If you can’t spell, maybe you could dictate to someone who can.
Find a dictionary that syllabifies words. A word that is usually unhyphenated may be too long to fit at the end of one line, yet wrapping it to the next line leaves too much white space in the (fully justified) previous line. In such a situation, appearance may better be served by splitting the word into two parts separated by a hyphen: the first part of the word, together with the hyphen, goes at the end of one line, and the second part of the word goes at the beginning of the following line. Since the hyphen should be placed between syllables and not split a syllable, you need to know a word’s syllable structure. A pronunciation guide is not adequate for this purpose (but your dictionary should have both!).
Be aware that quite a few things can subsequently make a word processor display a manually hyphenated word on a single line. These include, but are by no means limited to, text insertions or deletions and alterations in font. In such cases the hyphen becomes inappropriate. One possible stratagem is to use so-called “soft hyphens” which miraculously appear and disappear as needed in these situations. However, a word processor may display a soft hyphen differently from a conventional hyphen, in which case all instances of the former which occur at the end of a line (and only those that occur at the end of a line!) will eventually need to be replaced by instances of the latter. A word processor with macro capability may be able to automate this process, but it is a non-trivial exercise to construct the macro. (Such a macro is available for Nisus Writer Pro on Macintosh computers.) All of this might seem esoteric, but it is not uncommon to find residual inappropriate manually inserted hyphens persisting in a published manuscript. There is, of course, no excuse for this, as such errors stick out like the proverbial sore thumb on a simple reading through of the supposedly finished document — a final check all too frequently neglected in these careless times.
If you learn nothing else about punctuation, learn to use an apostrophe correctly. If you’ve mastered that, learn to discriminate among hyphens (-), en dashes (–) and em dashes (—).
If you learn nothing else about grammar, learn about dangling participles and then avoid them.
Be on the alert for ambiguity. Is there more than one way for the reader to interpret this? Is this what you want?
Be consistent.
Read your work yourself after writing. It is amazing how many people don’t do this. Many an embarrassing mistake can be averted by this simple expedient.
Make the reader want to keep reading. Make the reader want to turn the page. Make the reader want to start reading the next chapter. Make the reader want to pick the book up again. Make the reader want to recommend it to others. Make the reader want to seek out other of your works.
Refrain from showing your work to others until it represents your best work. Writing is not just story-telling. If you just want to tell a story, use your vocal cords. If you expect other people to read your story, don’t trespass on their generosity.
An accomplished writer pays due attention to all facets of the art: plot, pace, characterization, voice, description, sentence structure, vocabulary, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and so on. Defects in any of these areas constitute noise that the reader has to negotiate. Sometimes a writer wants to irritate and provoke a reader, but this is best done consciously, deliberately and skillfully, lest the reader’s response be unsympathetic to the author’s intent. It is difficult for someone to assess the merits of your plot or your character portrayal if the reading flow is forever being halted by spelling errors or lapses in punctuation.
Don’t postpone fixing any of these things until the manuscript is otherwise complete. Why would you assume that some aspects of the presentation are less important than others?
Demonstrate facility in your art, take pride in your work, and adopt a holistic approach to your writing. You will feel you are a better writer, and your readers will think you are, too.
The obstacles just mentioned notwithstanding, advice is cheap; work is expensive. It is not hard to find people, even professionals in the field, who will appraise your manuscript and suggest “improvements”. While some of these alterations may indeed be advisable and easy enough to implement, others may entail a major rewrite of part or all of your manuscript.
Now, there is a popular school of thought that maintains that much writing is rewriting, but it is not a school to which I subscribe — for various reasons. However, it is too easy for a novice to be duped by the mantra and go down the path of rewriting (and rewriting and…), when the pretext is patently specious. It is even easier to be so beguiled when you have paid for the appraisal and advice.
I am not saying that rewriting is never a good idea, or that it is never a good idea to pay for appraisal and advice. But I think it is a good idea to ask yourself first: If I do a major rewrite as this person suggests, will they guarantee to publish my work? Unfortunately, the answer is almost always: No. Add to this the fact that different people will give you different advice, and you start to appreciate the fallacy.
There are no easy answers here. As always, think hard before you (re)write!
Note: Students writing assignments, essays or theses may also care to peruse my Hints for Students page.
Regarding self-publishing primarily as a hobby rather than a money-making venture can save you a lot of angst.
The marketing is the key to the financial success of the project. Start with a small print run, even if it doesn’t give optimal economies of scale. Unsold stock teaches a different lesson in economies of scale!
Oxford English Dictionary (online)
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (print)
The SOED is also available on digital platforms. I consider the fact that a writer can carry such a formidable and iconic resource in his or her pocket one of the marvels of our times.
Be aware, though, that the iOS app is seriously flawed. Type “mainstay” into the search field and you get no exact matches, only the two suggestions, “gainsay” and “maistry”. Even using wildcards fails to find the word. The word is present in the dictionary, under “main [adjective]”, but you have to scroll a fair way before finding it. Many words are like this; eg, “cornerstone”. The problem is that such words occur as second-tier words and escape detection by the search engine which should be programmed to treat them as headwords. The information you expect from the SOED is all there: it’s just that you can’t find it! The SOED application for the Macintosh, on the other hand, does not suffer the same defect and is highly recommended.
The Chambers Thesaurus (print) — also available on digital platforms
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage by Pam Peters
The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage by Pam Peters
Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer
The Mac is not a typewriter or The PC is not a typewriter, both by Robin Williams