The Read Aloud Edit

Yes, I’ve been doing this with Babel and in one day got almost half way through it. It can of course make you throat very dry. It made my eyes go funny. But it is incredibly worth it. You notice so much more than when you read silently, for example:

• missing punctuation
• superfluous punctuation
• misspellings
• words missed out
• words added in
• clunky language
• repetitions
• lack of continuity between paragraphs
• ugly language
• darlings that still haven’t been killed
• overall flow

There is only one more edit after that – the copy edit, and in fact the reading out loud one partly does that anyway.

Editing the Ghost Stories

Yesterday I finished the other two Ordsall Hall Ghost Stories. It still seems right to do them from the points of view of the ghosts. Gosh – I hope I don’t upset anybody. The final two were about a disturbed ghost looking for his dog and how the spirits of the Hall supported someone there who was standing near to death.

I read them out loud to my husband. He wasn’t too scared. But what I noticed, of course, was all the editing that I still need to do. I’ve repeated ideas across the stories and really, although they’re five separate stories, they will probably be read at a sitting. I’ve even got the idea that if they’re not used after all for the event for which they were commissioned, I’d put them together to make one story which ends in a real haunting.

It does just show, again, how important it is to read aloud as the final edit. There are just some things you don’t notice when you read silently. I spotted a couple of copy editing matters as well. I think reading aloud makes you read more slowly, so you notice typos and grammatical mistakes, but also any awkward syntax.

So, now I go back to them to twiddle.