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Formating a manuscript
When writing a manuscript, I must confess I concentrated a first on the story the characters and the setting. But as the deadline to send my dissertation for my Master was coming closer I realised there was something had grossly over looked: The formatting. I’m not talking about typos, because those have a way of creeping behind your back. And so I believe that you need to have someone else read your manuscript to try and erase as much as you can because when you read a text you know, your brain does a silly thing and corrects the letters as you read, so you basically cannot spot any typos…
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Editing or the emotional rollercoaster
Why use a metaphor? Editing is not a roller coaster. It is a cold straightforward process, whereby an editor or your agent read your text and makes comments, suggests cuts and changes. From an outsiders point of view it does not seem so terrible. Not so terrible. This is what I thought. I had heard my tutor, Catherine Fox, say that one of her book had been edited by 25%. A that time, I was shocked, because having a quarter of the pages you have written thrown down the gutter sounded terribly brutal. But I sort of discarded that because I knew in the end she had a great book…