Lesson 12 - Editing and Proofreading

Editing - Read your story. Check it for content and style. Use this checklist of items to help you with your writing:

1.      Does your opening sentence grab the attention of your audience?

2.      Does your story have an introduction, a development, and a conclusion?

3.      Do the events come in the correct order?

4.      Look at each of your descriptive words. Do you have (dead words) such as  nice, stuff, thing, awesome, etc. ? If so, change these to words that "tell a story" or "paint a picture".

5.      Do your sentences begin with the same words used over and over? Alter your sentence beginnings.

6.      Does your conversation sound real?

7.      Do your sentences start with conjunctions: or, but, so, or and? If so, change them.

8.      Does your writing shift in point of view from first person "I" to second person "you" to third person "he, she, it"? Be consistent.

9.      Have you used vivid verbs? Watch out for weak verbs, e.g., is, are, was, were, got, etc. Use your thesaurus.
          Not walk but stroll, amble, march, stride, pace, hike, stagger, etc.

10.  Have you used figures of speech such as similes, alliteration, etc.?

11.  Do your sentences vary in length? Watch out for run-ons. Can you combine short choppy sentences?

Proofreading - Read your story again. Check it for the following items.

1.      Have you stayed in the same tense? (no shifting from past tense to present tense to past tense)

2.      Do you begin a new paragraph each time a different character speaks?

3.      Have you corrected spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors?