Proofreading

Any long time reader of mine is well aware that the first editions of my early books had too many typos. While I was well aware that I couldn't spell English to save my soul, I didn't realize how blind I was to my typing mistakes. I read what I expect to read, whether the word(s) is(are) actually on the page or not. As a result, I often miss in both typing and reading the little words that aren't there but should be. As well as the double words that arise either out of stopping to think of the next phrase, or from moving lines about in editing, and the use of the wrong words that look similar to the right ones. 

Proofreading is a very specialized skill, and though my wife, unlike me, knows the rules of grammar, spelling, and was a high school teacher for decades, she only finds 95+% of my mistakes, so that some of my mistakes inevitably through. Thankfully, over the years, some very kind readers have taken the time to point out the errors they come across to me that I then correct. Some of these kind people have since become my beta readers, and with their generous help I've been able to slowly improve all my books over the years.

I'd like to believe that having been at this writing thing most of my life, I've gotten better at it. And while I think I have, I'm still far from perfect. I have, however, started using several programs in addition to LibreOffice to process my work. Three years ago I discovered that Google Docs has a much more robust grammar checker than LibreOffice, so I ran all my published books through it, and now upload all of my new books to proofread my stories before handing the story off to my wife. It finds many of the double words and some of the wrong and missing words. But not all. My wife still had to do her proofreading, and my beta readers still find some typos that had escaped both Google Docs and my wife.

For Passage to Jarpara, I decided to add a second layer of automated grammar checking, and ran the story through the free version of Grammarly, after running it through Google Docs. It found a number of double words and wrong words that Google Docs had missed. I had hoped that between the two programs, I'd be able to hand my wife a clean copy that all she'd need to do was read it. Alas, this was not the case.

Spelling wise, few words escaped detection. There were several missing little words, mostly "to" that were missed by both programs. Grammarly liked hyphenated words, i.e. "white-painted house" and having no opinion one way or the other, I went along with Grammarly on that. However, something like 75% of Grammarly's suggestions involved the elimination or insertion of commas. I may not know the "rules" about comma placement, but place them where I think a speaker would pause, which, given that my books are now auto-generated audiobooks, is pretty important. Still, I made the lazy decision just to go with Grammarly on commas. My wife, however, quickly complained about the lack of commas where commas ought to be. I also found them missing where I would've, and maybe did, place them, so I spent a lot of time adding commas back in. Another point was that for some crazy reason, I decided to use semi-colons instead of my usual dashes. Grammarly didn't complain about them at all, but my wife has very strong  and narrow opinions on the use of semi-colons/colons, and so I had to go back to dashes to please her. I'll never use a semi-colon again.

Both these programs tend to ignore words that make no sense, so that they usually don't try to correct my made-up words. This simplifies things greatly. However, LibreOffice will underline them. And unfortunately I will misspell my own made-up words, and since they are all underlined, I never realize that I have. I could tell the program to ignore those words as I write them, but it seems to lose those instructions as soon as I close the program, so they're all underlined again the following morning. This time around, I spent several hours working on the final proofread draft, telling the program to ignore the correctly spelled made-up words, so that I could find my misspelled ones. I found maybe 20 of them. So frustrating.

I haven't given up hope of finding a completely reliable, and free, grammar checker, or perhaps use three or four of them in succession to see if I can eliminate all the errors that one or two programs seem to miss. But that will be for the next novel. This time around, I'm hoping that my beta readers don't find too many errors, none being too much to hope for. In any event, Passage to Jarpara should be a close to perfect as a C. Litka book in this world will ever be.