Alice Pilcher's Blog › The art of…

The art of self-editing

Published 9 months ago

Hi there, everyone, I’m Alice and I’ve joined Shortbread for the foreseeable future to help Fiona with the editing queue. It does seem a bit relentless at the moment, but it is a very enjoyable job as I have read some really fantastic stories.

With my editor’s hat on, however, there are a few points I would like to raise.  There have been some really elementary mistakes in quite a number of the stories I have read which really should have been corrected before being submitted, so here’s a few pointers which I hope will be of some help towards submitting a more polished piece of work: 

You're = you are
Your = Your name, your house

It's = It is
Its = belonging to it

Where = Location e.g. Where were you?

Were = Past tense for Are e.g. we were walking down the street when….

Now some of you will be thinking I am being rather patronising about this, but you would be surprised how many of you do it.  What is even worse is the use of text message speak.  U is not acceptable as You - N is not acceptable as And!

There also seems to be a general lack of understanding as to where commas should be placed within speech quotations (I too find this especially hard).

Please see examples below and take note:

‘I think’ he said ‘it’s going to rain today’

This should read:

‘I think,’ he said, ‘it’s going to rain today.’

There must be a comma (or a question mark, exclamation mark etc.) before the speech marks if it is followed by: he said, she said, he exclaimed etc etc.  There also must be a comma after the he snapped, he said, he sang, etc. before going onto follow this with further speech marks.

Furthermore, consistency is key - once you have made your mind up about something, stick to it.

Presentation is paramount when submitting stories, especially if you are submitting to a publisher. He or she may well discard a piece of work that is written carelessly, even if the story is the best they have ever read.  I do understand that sometimes, when writing a story, it is hard to see the mistakes because you instinctively read it how you believe it has been written.  It would, therefore, not be a bad idea to get someone else with a fresh mind to read over your stories just before you are about to send them off.

While Fiona has been tireless in her editing, and we really do want to help in every way, we don’t have the time or resources to be correcting careless mistakes. Believe me, some pieces literally take hours to edit and we still have to put them up thinking we wish we had time to do more. So please help us with as much self-editing as possible. It’ll mean we’ll be able to get stories up on the site much quicker.

Now, I hope you don’t use all this as ammunition to go through my editing with a fine tooth comb…! 

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