Monday, July 20, 2009

On to the Fun Part!

WooHoo! I have finished editing all the stories for both editions of Emerald Tales. It took a lot longer than I thought it would.

The biggest problem that I faced, other than commas, was putting the suggested changes into a computer file so that the author could see and understand what I was suggesting. Editing on paper is easy, get a colored pen or pencil, read through the text, and zip zap you're done. To do the same job on the computer takes forever. What is one second stroke with a pen is: highlight with the mouse, click on format, click on character, click on font, click on strike through, click style of strike through, then click on highlight. All that so the author can see the change. And most of the suggestions were for taking out or putting in a comma. Do you know, there is no good way on the computer to show that you want to delete a punctuation mark? The good part of it taking so long, is that I stopped and thought about each change that I suggested. Many times what I marked on the print out did not make it into the computer file. And sometimes, I caught stuff when I was working with the computer file that I missed my first time through.

And now on to the fun for me part, as soon as I get all the approvals for the changes in, I get to do the laying out of the magazine and making it all look pretty. Woo Hoo!


4 comments:

  1. Depending on the software you use, there should be keyboard shortcuts for strikethrough and highlight. Should speed things up a little. :-)

    OpenOffice has a way of displaying the changes made between two versions of a piece of work, but I don't know if it would show up correctly in things other than OpenOffice.

    YAY for finishing though. :)

    Adam

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  2. If you're using MS Word, just highlight and "insert comment". Then put your comment in the little box. "remove comma", "add comma", etc. That's how Adam, Scarlett, and I mark up each other's work, and it's nice and efficient.

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  3. Thank you for the suggestions. The problem is that the file has to be in a format that anyone can read regardless of their preferred word processing program and whether they have a pc or a mac.

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  4. Ah yes, the fun of marking up edits and getting it in a universal format... *grimace*

    Glad you got it done, I'm really looking forward to seeing the magazine. :D

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