Putting the I.T. into EdI.T.ing
How to speed up the revision process
How did Jane Austen do it? Did she have an editing app concealed in her little mahogany writing desk at Chawton? Perhaps the famous creaking door was a warning to whip away her laptop as well as the yellowing sheets of sloping black writing. Or Shakespeare: was there an iphone hidden in his doublet? Perhaps Thomas Hardy secretly had broadband installed at Max Gate.
No, we have to accept that these literary giants did it all by themselves: their seemingly effortless, error-free prose was the result of painstaking reading, scratching out, rereading and redrafting. Amazing really.
Thankfully, although the editing process is just as important in the twenty first century as in times gone by, we have a lot of extra help today. In fact, if we use I.T wisely, there is more electronic support out there that we might realise.
Let’s start with the obvious. A good spelling and grammar checker (make sure you turn off the American filter unless you’re aiming for that market) can reduce the basic howlers. It won’t do all the work for you as the following anonymous poem suggests:
I have a spell cheque function
It came with my PC
It plainly marques for my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I strike a key and type a word
And weight for it two say
Weather I am wrong or write
It shows me strait away.
As soon as a mistake is maid
It nose before two long
And I can put the error rite,
Its never, ever wrong.
I have run this poem threw it
I am shore you’re pleased to no
It’s letter perfect to the end
My spell cheque tells me sew.
(Anon)
Clearly we need to distinguish ourselves between homophones (words which sound the same but have different spellings and meanings). Computers can’t do everything. But they can do a lot….
An online thesaurus can help with avoiding clumsy repetition in your prose and it also creates lexical variety. A common piece of advice for new writers is to avoid adjectives and adverbs, choosing strong nouns and verbs instead, and a thesaurus can suggest options you may not have considered.
The ‘search and replace’ facility on your computer is excellent if you want to make global changes – such as characters’ names. Make sure you check the changes though, or you can end up with some hilarious mistakes, such as when a friend decided to change ‘Martin’ to ‘Roger’ in her play script and ended up having one character ask another if they wanted a roger in the garden, instead of a martini!
You can also use the search facility to track down ‘weasel words’ – those little fillers that essentially have no meaning but can water down our prose – ‘just’, ‘even’, ‘then’, ‘rather,’ ‘sort of’ etc. In face it’s quite alarming to discover one’s own overused words – we all have our linguistic tics!
Talking of ‘linguistic tics,’ speech recognition programmes can often make us more aware of our writerly quirks, as we can hear awkwardnesses more readily in another’s voice. The same goes for different fonts: changing your work (which should ideally be in Times Roman) into an unfamiliar font can help you to look at words afresh and hence achieve more objectivity.
You can use the graphs and charts facility on your P.C to produce timelines, intensity graphs , reader, writer and character arcs.
If I’m writing and don’t want to stop the flow to look something up, I often write XXX when I know I need to go back and infill at a later stage. I can easily find those places by typing XXX into a search engine.
Knowing how much help I.T. can give us makes us even more in awe of those literary giants who produced masterpieces with only pen and paper. In theory, with all these technical aids we should excel. Or is that Excel?