Red, Blue, Green--other?

All of the above

I start with a color I want to represent what I liked as a reader in a piece, even if it is my own. I go through, mark out any phrases, sentences or paragraphs that I liked.

Then I pick another color for phrases, sentences or paragraphs that I thought were awkward. Sometimes these overlap. You can have a sentence that you like but doesn't work quite right, yet. The important thing for the first couple read-throughs is to act as a reader, not an editor.

I pick up the red pen and look for the hard-core issues. I have a cheat sheet from my crit group(s) that I have developed. I look for the structural issues that affect the piece. Those I markup with my variants of editor's marks.

Then I have a multi-colored paper copy that allows me to see where trouble spots are very visually.

Another trick I use is to do the same thing with comments I get back from other people. If they mark-up the piece, I collate all the comments and edits into one document of overlapping marks. One color per person.

You can also do the same thing with the digital versions of your documents. Most word-processors have "Comments", highlighting and ink color selection.

Patterns will often appear, especially with paragraphs that you have difficulty with. Just be consistent between drafts or pieces, so that you can archive things and see if you continue to have the same issue over time with a particular scene, chapter.

Hope that helps.

Editing

SRHowen said:

Here's something I thought of--or have been thinking about. Err . . .

Anyway, if you print out a draft to edit by hand how do you format that draft? And what color pens, or pencils do you use? And what color do you use for what?

Me:

One side of the paper, courier new, 1.5 inch margins on three sides 2 inches on the bottom, and I triple space (at least) Like lots of room to edit it, and those two inches at the bottom get taken up with notes when needed.

I use pencils, the nice red on one side blue on the other ones. I have a bunch, they are getting harder to find, so if anyone knows of a place that still sells them, let me know.

I use red for grammar, spelling errors, and tech stuff--like extra spaces etc. I use blue for content stuff. Often just putting a little number in a circle next to where I want the change, then writing on the bottom of the page or on the back of the previous page if it's a long addition or change. Stuff I want removed I just draw a line through with regular #2 pencil--the refillable lead sort.

Makes it easy when I enter the editing into the computer. I also make it a practice to use copy editor’s marks.

Shawn

Click to expand...

I really do my first editing pass as I'm entering the longhand draft into the computer. I do almost all the rest on the screen. The only reason I print out a copy is because I've found my eyes do sometimes miss something on the screen.

The print out copy is really editing only for typos, and the occasional lcunky sentence. For this I use a pencil. I always like the ones that are red on one end and blue on teh other, but I can't find them anymore, so I use a red pencil.

But it's not terribly important. As I edit each page, I make corrections to the version still on the computer, so when I reach the last page, it's all finished.
It was much tougher before computers, and took at least a couple of weeks.

SRHowen said:

Stuff I want removed I just draw a line through with regular #2 pencil--the refillable lead sort.

Click to expand...

Love those refillable pencils. Hate to pencil sharpen! Now, if only they'd make a refillable red pencil.... Or do they?

2" top and side margins, 3" at the bottom. Double spaced. Times New Roman 12. (I guess I have the only editor in the world that demands TNR) Edits are in pencil (Warrior #2) and green highlighter.

Unlike James R., I don't have the eye to edit as I write.

stormie said:

Love those refillable pencils. Hate to pencil sharpen! Now, if only they'd make a refillable red pencil.... Or do they?

Click to expand...

I've found red pencil lead. Unfortunately, it's very brittle and snaps constantly when I write, so I use it only for typoes and broad annotations.

Otherwise, I print out in more-or-less manuscript formatting and edit with a mechanical pencil. Lots of scratch paper for longer insertions and rewrites.

Sharpie markers, ultra fine point. I positively love them, sold in all different sized packs with different colors. I'll use any of the colors, except for black, for editing.

Just reach in the drawer and use whichever color comes out first!

I'll write longhand if I'm brainstorming, or if I need a change of pace (like sitting in a coffee shop), but I always do the actual writing on the computer. It's a simple reason: I type faster than I write, and if I write longhand, my hand can't keep up with my brain.

I've also taken to carrying a tiny digital recorder with me; if I'm out and have an idea, I just record it and work on it later. I also keep it by my nightstand to record dreams and because I always get my best ideas right before I fall asleep.

For editing, I use whatever pen is handy (except black or red - red makes me anxious ). Within a Word document, I highlight scenes that need reworking in yellow and lines/paragraphs that are questionable or could be moved in blue.

I don't have a colour printer, though, so I do as much as I can on the screen, but I absolutely have to print out a copy of each major revision; I don't know why, but I can see things on paper that I'd never catch on screen.

For structural issues, I use colour-coded Post-it strips. Let's say I have a paragraph on page 17 that would better serve the story on page 8. I put a marker on each page, noting the paragraph as "A" and on page 8, "Insert A."

I only double-space, and I use regular margins, but my handwriting is tiny,

Red

stormie said:

Love those refillable pencils. Hate to pencil sharpen! Now, if only they'd make a refillable red pencil.... Or do they?

Click to expand...

They do make red lead for mechanical pencils. I need it on occasion, and get mine at the nearest Staples.

Longahnd

firehorse said:

It's a simple reason: I type faster than I write, and if I write longhand, my hand can't keep up with my brain.

Click to expand...

Same here, which is one of the main reasons I DO write in longhand. The last thing on earth I want when I'm writing is for my hand to keep up with my brain. I want my brain dancing out well ahead of what I'm writing so that by the time my hand gets there, my brain, consciously or subconsciously, has already thought about it two or three times, plus has edited and rewritten it.

SRHowen said:

Here's something I thought of--or have been thinking about. Err . . .

Anyway, if you print out a draft to edit by hand how do you format that draft? And what color pens, or pencils do you use? And what color do you use for what?

Click to expand...

Courier 12, single-sided, double-spaced, 1-1/4" margins. I could go wider on the margins, but I have tiny handwriting and that amount of space seems to feel most comfortable.

I use red, then green, pens to edit. I do the first pass in red, during which I correct the most obvious errors in spelling and punctuation, and make minor changes, but what I'm mainly interested in is marking places where the language goes flat, or the story has holes or ragged edges. I may cross out words and phrases, or add or change a word here and there, but on the first pass I mainly try to concentrate on how the parts of the story fit together as a whole.

The red-pen stage is where I identify problems, but when I pick up my green pen and start the second pass, that's when I begin to fix them. I try to do the red-pen edit as quickly as I can, but I slow down and take my time with the green-pen edit.

By the time I'm done, thanks to all those red and green markings and scrawls, the ms. usually looks like Father Christmas lost his lunch on it. It's not a pretty sight.

Wow, lots of people seem to have similar systems! Me too. But I hate red pencil. With me, it started when I critiqued stories in a group because I thought seeing red pencil or marker on their works would upset most people. So I started this system, and I keep it to edit my own work:

Green for obvious grammar and style errors.

Golden for the best bits of writing.

Light-blue for questionable content.

Lilac for the bits that need research.

But never red! It makes me feel as if I'm back to that English class again.

I guess I'm odd, because I do EVERYTHING on the computer. I've tried to edit by hand, but it's too dang frustrating. It probably comes from being a computer programmer. But it has it's advantages too, because I've created several macros in Word to automate the process.

First of all, I have a macro which changes the color of passive verbs (was, were, could, did, have, etc.) into red. It's amazing how much red you'll find on a page that you think is perfectly fine. Of course, not all of the words marked red are wrong. Passive verbs are permissible sometimes, but it makes me look it over carefully again.

I have another macro which changes the color of boring or nondescriptive words (very, much, many, extremely, suddenly, somewhat, etc) into blue.

These macros are really quite simple to set up. I've got instructions on my website here:
http://www.rogerjcarlson.com/WritingHelp/TechTips.html

I have another macro which will change the background color of selected text and add a bookmark that I can search for. For instance:

This is a boring sentence. <<here>><<make it less boring>>

Above "This is a boring sentence." would be highlighted in yellow. I can use search and replace to look for every instance of <<here>> and the notation following it tells me what's wrong with the highlighted text.

This is very useful when I get manuscripts back from my beta readers. Other than simple copy editing, I put every note from every reader into the electronic copy, highlighting them with the above macro and entering their notes. Then I start at the beginning and make appropriate changes.

When I edit a chapter, I pull the text out to a separate file, edit it until I'm satisfied, then paste it back into the main file.

Editing

Roger J Carlson said:

I guess I'm odd, because I do EVERYTHING on the computer. I've tried to edit by hand, but it's too dang frustrating. It probably comes from being a computer programmer. But it has it's advantages too, because I've created several macros in Word to automate the process.

First of all, I have a macro which changes the color of passive verbs (was, were, could, did, have, etc.) into red. It's amazing how much red you'll find on a page that you think is perfectly fine. Of course, not all of the words marked red are wrong. Passive verbs are permissible sometimes, but it makes me look it over carefully again.

I have another macro which changes the color of boring or nondescriptive words (very, much, many, extremely, suddenly, somewhat, etc) into blue.

These macros are really quite simple to set up. I've got instructions on my website here:
http://www.rogerjcarlson.com/WritingHelp/TechTips.html

I have another macro which will change the background color of selected text and add a bookmark that I can search for. For instance:

This is a boring sentence. <<here>><<make it less boring>>

Above "This is a boring sentence." would be highlighted in yellow. I can use search and replace to look for every instance of <<here>> and the notation following it tells me what's wrong with the highlighted text.

This is very useful when I get manuscripts back from my beta readers. Other than simple copy editing, I put every note from every reader into the electronic copy, highlighting them with the above macro and entering their notes. Then I start at the beginning and make appropriate changes.

When I edit a chapter, I pull the text out to a separate file, edit it until I'm satisfied, then paste it back into the main file.

Click to expand...

I'm more like you than not. I do 99.9% of my editing onscreen, and it seems to work just fine. The print copy I do is just insurance, and I catch the occasional typo my eye missed onscreen, and I have one last chance to find a clunky sentence. But for the most part, the print version goes untouched.

I use Word 2003, and I find the editing tools it has are incredible. I use "Track Changes" constantly, along with "Find/Replace," "Compare and merge."
I also love the way "Comments" works in this version of Word.

So far, I haven't needed macros with this version of word, but a macro to highlight "to be" verbs sounds like a good thing. I think I'd also like one that highlighted the words "that" and "got." Easy to do, I think.

I downloaded your article, and I'll give it a read this evening. Sounds like a really good idea.

What I'd really like is a program that worked through Word that would tell me how many times each word in a story is used. You can do this through Find/replace, but you have to ask which word you want it to list, and this isn't much help unless you know which word you might have overused.

I used to have a freeware text editor that had this feature, but it won't work on XP, and I haven't been able to find another.

Jamesaritchie said:

What I'd really like is a program that worked through Word that would tell me how many times each word in a story is used. You can do this through Find/replace, but you have to ask which word you want it to list, and this isn't much help unless you know which word you might have overused.

I used to have a freeware text editor that had this feature, but it won't work on XP, and I haven't been able to find another.

Click to expand...

Oh, now you've done it! I actually wrote one once. Can't think where it is just now. It didn't work with Word. You had to save the document as a text file, but it counted the number of times each word was used.

It should be possible to do in Word. Hmmmm.....

I have small handwriting (When I want to, anyhow), so when I want to edit somethng in hard copy, I kill two birds with one stone: I leave the text double-spaced, and I leave the opening of the chapter formatted so there's a big chunk of space at the top, and start every new chapter on a new page. But I also shrink it to about 9 point, and put it in two columns on a landscaped ("Sideways") letter-sized page, in a font other than the one I've been writing in so far (Garamond of Bookman Old style tend to be legible but different enough from Courier).

This means the text is thoroughly jumbled up from where my eyes are trained to see it, but leaves me room enough for typo and sentence level notes between the lines. I also leave page numbers at the top, so if I suddenly have to make more copious notes, I can always put them ona new page and just make a note of the paper copy's page number.

So far I haven't had to do that much since I started using this method - partly because of that same small handwriting (I can include a surprising number of notes in the margins), and partly because of chapter ends and starts, which are big chunks of blank space.

I don't feel too guilty about the trees I "kill" (Partly re: another topic I guess), because all the paper I print rough drafts on is stuff alreayd printed on one side and taken from my work, which does not, aside from my efforts, have a recycling program (I also periodically take home big bags of used envelopes, shredded papers too confidential to just use as scrap, etc to dump in the home bin).

Crayola makes erasable pencil crayons, which are fabulous.

Roger J Carlson said:

Oh, now you've done it! I actually wrote one once. Can't think where it is just now. It didn't work with Word. You had to save the document as a text file, but it counted the number of times each word was used.

It should be possible to do in Word. Hmmmm.....

Click to expand...

Well, I finally did it. I wrote a program to count word frequency. I started a new thread about it in the Novel Writing forum, but I thought I'd post it here,too.

You can find it on my website, here:
http://www.rogerjcarlson.com/WritingHelp/TechTips.html