Sheila Deeth Editing

My Christmas letter reached my nephew yesterday, having spent, it seems, six weeks orbiting the planet. So what went wrong? Nobody knows. We proofread the letter and the envelope. We added the right postage (albeit in a rather strange, printed stamp because the Post Office ran out of "forever international" stamps). We posted it only a few days later than we should have. But six weeks! And sometimes, no matter how carefully you (or your editor) edits, how well you (or your editor) proofreads, and how perfectly you (or your editor) make sure you've obeyed all the rules, some little errors slip by. The advantage of Print on Demand is you can fix them before too many people see them. If you have friends willing to point things out, and a sweet deal where new uploads of files (to your print or ebook service) are free, that's a really big advantage. If you have to pay for uploads, maybe less so. If you have to pay for changes, you'll probably want to balance perfec...

It was an old song, sung on an old scratchy record, and I loved it. The protagonist in the musical tale had won some kind of lottery, and wished he hadn't. At least, that's how I remember it. So now he lamented, "If I'd only put an X instead of one." Maybe it was the tune. Maybe it was the fact that the song really did tell a story. Or the singer's voice. Or knowing I could only hear it if Mum and Dad would put the record on for me... We signed up for healthcare recently - got help with it, because, well, it's kind of a really big deal and we didn't want to make any mistakes. But then I couldn't create my online account, so I called the helpline. "Ah, we're having problems with the website. Just wait till January," they said. Then, "Ah, we're having problems with the website. Just wait a few more days." Then, "Ah, it's the website. Don't worry; you really are insured." Which helped, a bit. Then I ph...

Did you spot the typo in the header? Spotting weird typos can depend on several things: What font is being used. Some fonts offer plenty of white space between letters; others run them together, which makes weird typos like this much harder to notice. How involved were you in the reading. Perhaps, like me, you tend to gloss over unimportant stuff like chapter headings - let me get to the story! If you already know what the words should say (if you're the author perhaps), why would see something different from what you expect? And of course, if the words are deep in a complex plot or argument, your brain may be just too busy understanding what's going on to spot what's not. Creating weird typos depends on several things too: Perhaps you typed "moderm" instead of "modern" and spell-check made the wrong guess. Perhaps you scanned in a document, and image-to-text failed to see the white space betweeen r and n. Perhaps you used text to speech ...