I’m an avid reader. Have been all my life. My mother says I read a book when I was being potty trained. Well, that’s what she said, but who knows what’s fact or fiction from proud mothers.
I use a Kindle for most of my reading and recently I have been noticing more writers mistakenly using the word past for passed. That means that the writer didn’t thoroughly proof their work, or it means that they didn’t get the book edited by someone else.
If you are using Word to prepare your manuscript, there is a simple thing you can do that will help to prevent this sort of error slipping by you, and that is to not only do a spell check, but a grammar check. The grammar check will point out errors in grammar such as using past instead of passed.
For example, my fingers frequently misspell the words from/form. A regular spell check would not detect that because they are both spelled correctly, but a grammar check would find it because it wouldn’t fit into the sentence correctly.
A grammar check does not take the place of using an editor. It is a simple check you can easily do before sending to the editor to cut down on errors. This means the editor would be spending less time on your work, thus saving you money.
I have written two books which are currently published on Kindle: “Self Publishing: Formatting Tips and Tricks That Work Like Magic,” Parts 1 and 2. While these books do not take the place of an editor, they do offer some suggestions for you to use in creating your manuscript which will help in editing.
