Zen Master: Blog

The Management has posted my essay "Why We Proofread Our Work" on the authors' resource page, at the very bottom with all the other how-to essays. Awesome!

-ZM

I have submitted a new essay "Why We Proofread" for posting here. It isn't a story. It actually belongs on the list of author's resources but I don't know how to post things there. Also, it is listed as "true story" for both genre and codes because the submission wizard insists that you select at least one.
Oh, and it probably needs a proofreader. None of my normal proofreaders wanted to touch this one, for some reason.

-ZM

Stevew - You have two blog entries asking for help. You have this site's 'internal email' turned off in your account, so we can't email you. As part of that, we can't reply to your blog posts, either.
Therefore, your first step should be to enable email and blog replies. After that, anyone who wants to help you will be able to contact you.
Failing that, you could put a 'real' email address out for others to use, but I recommend not as you would probably get a lot of spam.

-ZM

I try to privately email other authors to let them know that the lack of a proofreader is obvious, but sometimes I can't find a way to do that. We all need proofreaders. We have what we want to write in our minds, and we type what we're thinking. We cannot proofread our own work, as our minds know what words are supposed to be there and we don't notice the mistake. It takes a separate person, reading someone else's work, to notice things that have gone awry.
A spell-checker program will only point out things that aren't correctly-spelled words. The program has no way to know that the correctly-spelled word used isn't the CORRECT word. Only a human reader will realize that there's something wrong.

-ZM

I've been reading your current story "A New Life" and I keep seeing the word "power" where the word "powder" fits the context. I mean, the narrator is talking about 1800s weapons, and he says "... and power and shot for the revolvers...". I've seen it twice so far. A spell-checker program will not find this, since 'power' is a properly-spelled word. It's just the wrong word. You need a second pair of eyes to catch stuff like that.

(Oh, yeah. You seem to have all SOL feedback turned off. Email, feedback, reader comments, all off. The only way to tell you is a public shout-out in the blogs.....)

-ZM