"SHINE ME UP!"

              Polishing/Editing

 

Try a little polish to make anything stand out from the rest.

We love the shine of freshly polished wood and shoes back in the day when men still did things like that.

Polishing isn’t only critical for furniture and shoes but explicitly for writing.

Before we go a step further, for those who don’t know what polishing is, in terms of manuscripts, it means you’ve combed through your work until it’s at its best.

You’ve prepared it for the publisher and readers like the perfect Sunday dinner.

I’m a little old school, but do you remember typewritten reports that were meticulously groomed before you turned them in?

How well polished it was determined if you’d get an A or a big fat F marked in Red.

The same applies now, only we have amazing editing tools to help us spit shine our work.

Not only publishers but readers love to read books that are aesthetically pleasing to the eye and free of errors.

We want our work as close to perfection as possible, but there are limits to that. In other words, don’t polish holes into your work.

In some cases, less is more, even when polishing your manuscript.

So here are a few polishing tips:

1.      Print your manuscript. I recommend this if you want a trusted person to read through it for you and highlight changes or mistakes. Otherwise, use the focus format on your computer to change the reading mode and read through it yourself.

2.      Read the dialogue out loud. That is always a good idea; however, the writer may overlook things a fresh pair of eyes might find. I highly recommend using the Review feature in Word to do that for you. The inflection for this feature needs work, but it’s not a narration, only a better way to hear what you’ve written.

3.      Cess out what can stay or go. Remember, less is more, and you don’t need to take the scenic route to express your thoughts.

4.      Get that word count down! Long sentences aren’t on-trend or preferable to readers. They hate them as much as unnecessary overstuffed wordage. If you can use the same word in five or fewer letters, roll with that.

5.      Proper formatting will eliminate unnecessary line spaces between paragraphs. If you’re unsure how to do this, watch a tutorial explaining how it’s done in detail.

If you follow these examples, you will have successfully polished your entire manuscript and shine like the brightest star in the writing universe.