The next stage of working on my manuscript

The copyedits for The Secret Life of Carolyn Russell were returned to me recently. I had a fortnight to go through them and found this was just about long enough to complete the changes needed. Here are three things I was reminded about along the way:

Compound words

How could I have got so many compound words wrong? Take two separate words and combine them to make a new word with a different meaning. When you put the nouns post + box together, created is the red box where we post our letters, a postbox. Sounds simple, right?

One look at this page on Grammarly, and I realise it can be more complicated.

Ellipsis…

Who knew a space either side of those three little dots indicates missing text? (I did but somehow forgot.) It’s only when the three dots are attached to a word that the trailing off of speech is intended. And don’t get me started on dashes– these show where dialogue is interrupted.

But

I had used the word but 753 times in the manuscript. I decided this was rather too many and weeded out 300 of them. Often, the word was unnecessary (particularly at the start of a sentence) and the rest I changed to except, although etc. Other high usage words included once, only and with. However did I cope before the find and replace facility?

The next stage of the editing process is proofreading. Who knows what terrible errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar this will flag up. Wish me luck!