Category: Uncategorized

How can I proofread my own work?

It’s easy to proofread someone else’s work.  Each sentence is new and fresh, and it didn’t start inside your own head. You can read it far more objectively. But when it’s your own writing …

You already know what you’re talking about. You understand the concepts, for one, and all of the background information that you might not have actually included here. You can throw in phrases like “the Swanson Marginalia” or “the Macnaghten Memoranda” because hey, you know what they mean. And when your eyes rove over your own sentences, your brain is more than willing to argue that it’s actually read all of the missing words.

The best option is clearly to have someone who’ll carefully read over your writing and find all of those pesky mistakes. Editors and peer reviewers can help you catch the major things. But for a piece that isn’t either edited or peer reviewed, when you have to make sure it’s presentable all on your own … what can you do?

  • Let it sit. If you have time between when you finish writing it and when it’s due, let it sit. Print it off and make sure it’s saved in a couple different places so you can’t lose it, but put it aside for as long as you can. You can never come back to your writing with entirely fresh eyes, but at least you won’t be as caught up in the actual writing of the piece when you come back to it.
  • Make Word read it to you. You can force yourself to go slow, sentence by sentence, and even read it out loud to yourself, but you can still skim over missing or similar words. Word has “Read Aloud” (under “Review”) and while it’s not the most expressive reader, it will only read what you actually have on the page. This is a good way to catch similar words, missing words, or that pesky sentence that just doesn’t make sense.
  • Read it one sentence at a time … backward. This is time-consuming and I’ve only done it after editors have signed off on the overall flow of a piece so I know it makes sense, because this isn’t reading for sense. It’s dissecting your work so that you can’t fall into a flow and anticipate what comes next. Working backward means you have to concentrate on this sentence and just this sentence.

And of course, if all else fails … go back and read what you wrote after you hit “submit.” After all, we’re all bound by Gaiman’s Law:

“Picking up your first copy of a book you wrote, if there’s one typo, it will be on the page that your new book falls open to the first time you pick it up.”

“How do you outline a book?”

Sticky notes. Seriously. I’ve even framed the outline for Ripper’s Victims because honestly, how pretty is that? They’re not just sticky notes – they’re COLOR CODED sticky notes. I had some issues because you can see how one of the chapters exploded and took over a few more columns at the bottom, but that, my friends, was a labor of love. There was a yardstick involved.

I use sticky notes because the blank page paralyzes me the most when I have absolutely nothing to work from. Whether it’s the pen getting all hot and sticky in my hand or the cursor endlessly blinking, it’s just too intimidating. If I’m doing sticky notes, then I can only mess up in small ways and have to toss a single note instead of a whole sheet of paper. (Erasable pens help there anyway, but I love the feel of a good Sharpie.) Plus the whole point of a stick note is to be movable. You can put it one place, change your mind, and move it to another. For some reason the cut and paste function in Word just doesn’t work the same way for me. Typed things look far too official and assured for the outlining stage.

Color-coding also really helps me. In the Ripper’s Victims outline it means you can still tell what fits into the 1990s chapter, and it also gives a good visual of how the text was going to unfold: the first couple chapters cover two decades each, with only three sticky notes, and the last three are all since the year 2000. It gave me an idea of how much had to fit into each chapter, as well as how much work I still had to do. There’s a little X in the bottom corner of each sticky note. One slash meant I’d read the book, and the second meant I’d typed up the important notes from it.

Now, Ripper’s victims was actually pretty easy to outline once I’d gotten the concept: a survey of full-length single subject books about Jack the Ripper, focusing on what they had to say about the murdered women. That outline is literally just a list of book titles sorted by decade. It still looked like a monumental task, but I could cross off a number of books right away and then read them in publication order, since I didn’t necessarily want to put them all in conversation with each other until the conclusion. For Words of a Monster, the focus was different (and there aren’t nearly as many books about H.H. Holmes as there are about the Ripper). That one is more thematic, trying to catch all the broad strokes that made up the person I was seeing him present himself to be.

Sticky notes are also great for jotting down ideas as they come to me when I’m reading or even when I’m thinking about something else entirely. If it’s a good idea, I want to get it on paper before it can fly away. Right now I’m trying to keep all my notes together, but even a scrap of paper will work for a few words. They usually take the form of either a more general idea or a specific example that would fall under one of those ideas, and – again – the sticky note/scrap of paper method means I can move them around before figuratively cementing them in place.

Stephen King says that “You must not come lightly to the blank page,” but it’s a lot less stressful to come to a blank sticky note.

[originally shared on my Facebook author page]

Welcome!

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Hello and welcome to my author page! I am a writer who has a PhD in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture, but when people ask “So what does that mean?” I tell them that I’m interested in how we talk and write about crime, both true and fictional.

It started with my dissertation, “Identity and Ritual: The American Consumption of True Crime,” which looked at the way Americans have been writing about crime since the very beginning – Puritan execution sermons printed in the 1600s. (Librarians are wonderful at helping you track down the only surviving copies of execution sermons, although many of them are hard to read.)

I’ve written about multiple true murderers — like Jack the Ripper, H.H. Holmes, and Steven Avery — and also fictional murderers written by Stephen King. I’ve been presenting on King at the National Popular Culture Conference since 2014 with other amazing researchers who like to geek out over the Master of Horror. It’s a good bet that I’ve pre-ordered his next book as soon as it’s announced.

In my free time, when I’m not writing or reading about the history of true crime, I like to knit. There aren’t many serial killer-based knitting patterns (for some reason …) but I’ve got an awesome pair of mitts that look like the carpet in some famous horror movie. (I used to have a hat, too, but I’ve lost it somewhere …)

Thanks for stopping by. It’s good to have you along for the ride as I explore more about the history and rhetoric of true (and fictional) crime.