EASY THINGS TO SEARCH FOR WITHIN A DOC WHEN COPYEDITING

I put out a call for tips on Facebook. Here’s the list that came back:

- Empty to be verbs: there is, there are, there was, there were, that was, who was, who is

- Search for “that” to check for (1) that/who errors and (2) unnecessary thats

- Accidental double spaces

- Look for unnecessary phrases: in order to, start to, currently

- Look for intensifiers: very, really, extremely

- Can look for “ly” if adverbs are a problem

- Look for imprecise use of “thing”

- Look for “over” when they mean “more than”

- Look for when they say “amount” and mean “number”

- Look for when they say “less” and mean “fewer”

- empty phrases: http://www.academicpeds.org/espauthoring/page_05.htm (Tho many are pretty lawyery or academic and would never show up in certain books.)

- look for “too,” “just,” “who/whom”

- run portions of text through a word frequency app, and then check the most used words for echos/overuses. Or just make a list of words that might be overused and ctrl-f them to figure out quantity and spacing (by looking at the scroll bar)

- “and I” vs “and me”

- ALL APOSTROPHES

- You” a casual non-specific pronoun we use a lot when speaking that causes pronoun disagreement. “Between states” verb forms like “started to / about to / nearly,” etc. also used casually in speech but can’t really be visualized. “ing” verb forms, esp. at the end of a sentence – causes the sentence to lose energy / momentum.

- he/she errors

- “only,” “even,” “actually”

After using these last edits, I sent the draft of EarthBound on to Adam R for layout. We’ve almost got a book!