Add My Voice

Have you ever published your work and then cringed while reading the publication? Well, if so, I wholeheartedly sympathize with you. The editor’s job is vastly different from the writer’s artistic attempt at making a sentence look and sound exciting and clever. The editor has to make the sentence grammatically correct for the audience to understand. If you have studied foreign languages, grammar, and punctuation, you might empathize with me and my occasional doubts as to whether the spelling, punctuation, and grammar, are accurate for the language in use. I used several types of free apps for spelling and grammar checks for English, my primary language for independent publishing, and although they were helpful, errors were present in the published version. Gasp! It is a labor of love to rewrite the texts as an editor because one must repeatedly go over each counted character and the spaces, to make sure the tiniest details are grammatically correct. Even something as simple as nearly four thousand words becomes almost twenty-one thousand characters and spacings to review. I shudder at the thought of editing my fourteen thousand words in a manuscript, again.
I suppose this is why the novelists of seventy thousand words and upward to the hundreds of thousands of words, have professional editors to do the difficult task. I think it is intense because our minds are already trained by guessing games and context to understand shortened words with missing vowels, so consequently, when editing one’s work, it becomes questionable as to the accuracy of the edits. To save yourself hours of editing time to use for writing time, I recommend purchasing a subscription to a professional editing application. I made an investment purchase for a subscription to Grammarly and felt immediate relief because I know it will make all of the necessary edits on the drafts much faster and more precise. The premium version of the app has added services, one of which is used to check for plagiarism through an enormous amount of internet content. I was surprised, genuinely impressed, and slightly perplexed when the app notified me that the paragraph I added was already on the internet on a website and suggested that I reference the work in one of the three options offered, however, it was our website with a post about the book writing and publishing experience of the same book. The app impressively recognized the content, but it did not understand that the author of the book and website’s post were the same person. I referenced my work, which seemed strange, yet delightful as an advertisement for the site in the book; however, I was concerned about the fact that the book is a children’s book, and the website is for an audience who is interested in politics, art, and ideas. One object was discussing projects and the mechanics of publishing a book, and the other item is a story illustrated with mixed media art. I hope this purchase makes the work more enjoyable and less frustrating for us.