EASY THINGS TO SEARCH FOR WITHIN A DOC WHEN COPYEDITING

I put out a call for tips on Facebook. Here’s the list that came back:

– Empty to be verbs: there is, there are, there was, there were, that was, who was, who is
– Search for “that” to check for (1) that/who errors and (2) unnecessary thats
– Accidental double spaces
– Look for unnecessary phrases: in order to, start to, currently
– Look for intensifiers: very, really, extremely
– Can look for “ly” if adverbs are a problem
– Look for imprecise use of “thing”
– Look for “over” when they mean “more than”
– Look for when they say “amount” and mean “number”
– Look for when they say “less” and mean “fewer”
– empty phrases: http://www.academicpeds.org/espauthoring/page_05.htm (Tho many are pretty lawyery or academic and would never show up in certain books.)
– look for “too,” “just,” “who/whom”
– run portions of text through a word frequency app, and then check the most used words for echos/overuses. Or just make a list of words that might be overused and ctrl-f them to figure out quantity and spacing (by looking at the scroll bar)
– “and I” vs “and me”
– ALL APOSTROPHES
– You” a casual non-specific pronoun we use a lot when speaking that causes pronoun disagreement. “Between states” verb forms like “started to / about to / nearly,” etc. also used casually in speech but can’t really be visualized. “ing” verb forms, esp. at the end of a sentence – causes the sentence to lose energy / momentum.
– he/she errors
– “only,” “even,” “actually”

After using these last edits, I sent the draft of EarthBound on to Adam R for layout. We’ve almost got a book!