I use an older version of MS Word on an older version of the MS Surface laptop. If you want to know why, click here.
First pass is the careful read through. This is practically worthless because I always get caught up in the story and forget I’m supposed to be editing. This is also the last time you will enjoy the story before it is published, so take your time and… enjoy!
Second pass is Grammarly. I hate the MS Word add-in because it has had serious flaws that I have reported to them and they have not fixed yet. For example, it has selected half of one word and half of the next word with the space in the middle and tell me the word “ck yo” does not exist. If you watch the number of errors found it goes up and down like a yo-yo, forgetting things you earlier told it to ignore. Drives me completely insane.
The tolerable way to use it is to copy a chapter (or scene) at a time into the web version. Do not fix things and then copy back because it is not a trustworthy editor, especially if you have italicized or otherwise modified words. Just step through what it finds, if you agree with the change, make it in your document and save it before moving on. Tedious? You betcha!
The Editor in MS Word 365 is pretty good if you have the right options chosen. Grammarly is slightly less work in my experience. This will likely change as they make improvements.
Third pass is the live read. Some like to hear their own voice. I do not. Text to speech is available for free in many forms, most of them painful to listen to for long periods. There are probably some AI offerings out there, but the ones I have tried are expensive and or terrible. This is where Office 365 has earned it’s subscription. The Read Aloud feature is actually very good and is improving all the time. The voice goes up when a question mark is reached. Most proper nouns come out correctly. It has even sounded out some of my made-up words correctly. It still trips on some word pronunciation when the spelling is identical. Résumé was pronounced re-zoom. Hopefully things like that will be fixed by the time you read this.
Hearing the words out loud engages a different part of the brain and you will find 99.9% of the remaining defects in the story.
My latest strategy is to make two copies of the document to be Read-Aloud edited. One will be the final edit document. The other will be the inexpensive audiobook, so I name it with an AB suffix. I start the reading in the AB version which will auto-scroll, highlighting each word as it is read. With every error found, I stop the reading and correct it in the final edit document, then copy the fix into the AB document. For every mispronunciation, I stop and type in phonetic versions of the word until the reading is acceptable. (Résumé became Rez zoom May) For incorrect timing, I add commas to put in proper pausing, etc.
At the end of this process, I play into a digital recorder the Read Aloud again in the AB document and I have a low-quality audiobook for sale. For children’s books you could do a screen capture for a read along video since it highlights each word as it is read.
Fourth pass is the line edit. You will read every sentence ten times, or until you are certain it is exactly as you want it. What I discovered is that if I start at the end and work backward, I almost never forget I’m editing and get caught up in the story. And you thought Grammarly was tedious…
As you read each line, there are thousands of rules that may or may not apply. What kind of sentence is it? Dialog is the most difficult. Is this how the character sounds? Do they always use contractions? Do they have verbal ticks? This is where a professional editor earns their exorbitant salary. I could spend ten thousand hours on a single novel and I will never find all the errors. At some point, you need to be able to say ‘good enough’.
Final pass is the beta reader(s). That ahole that wrote the bad review for your typos? Bet him a hundred bucks he can’t find any in the new book. Cheapest quality control money can buy. Yes, I’m kidding.
A good beta reader will enjoy the story and give good criticism. Some will do it for free in order to get your latest story earlier than everyone else. These are known as fans. Fans will not be brutally honest with you. Do you need that at this stage? Maybe. This is the downside of self-editing to save money. It costs nothing to upload your eBook. If any sell, it is pure profit. What if a small change would have turned each book sale into a referral to a friend? Five friends? A blog post read by hundreds? Perhaps the final editing pass is too late for changing or improving the story. The reality is that it is never too late.