A good book always possesses good writing which is the product of good editing. Given that you have already written a draft which you intend to publish online or in print, here are some tips to make it look more professional .You may have a good story to tell but it is only good writing that makes your story deliver the contents to the reader. Some readers never forgive bad writing even though you have a good story. One good example is Fifty Shades Of Grey trilogy which though achieved record breaking success has been hardly appreciated by critics for its the bad writing style. So it is necessary that your writing should be well edited before it reaches the mass of people and avoid any harsh comments or reviews. The tips below would help you to achieve them.
- Organize your work: Typography is a valuable skill for any work that intends to reach the masses. Always use optimum font and line spacing. Use font styles that are prominent. Most of the writers choose Times New Roman with 12 as font size. Use of bold and Italics are restricted and used only for adding weight to some particular lines.
- Use correct grammar: Any good book or article always accompanies good English with correct usage of grammar. Use “a”, “the” and “an” where they are intended to be. The use of voices, punctuation marks and phrases, all makes the writing professional and flawless.
- Formatting your documents: Always format the documents before submitting them to any website or publishing house. Each publishing house has their own standard of formatting. Use groups and bullet list for making points. Having a header, page numbers and table of contents would make the work more reader friendly.
- Spell-check every time: If you use MS word for your editing services, make use of the spelling and grammar check to avoid any typographical error.
- Read out loud: Reading a piece out loud helps you to identify clunky, awkward passages that seem to make no sense to the eye, especially to the author’s eye.
- Justify yourself: Each and every word and statement should have a reason to be in your work. Get rid of any unwanted ones and check for unnecessary redundancies that are not needed.
- Write shorter chunks of content of no more than about 4 or 5 lines at a time. Splitting up your writing like this will increase scan-ability and decrease the chances of your message being lost somewhere in a sea of words. A good practice is to group sentences into chunks of no more than 4 or 5 lines.
- Use relevant images if necessary: Using or placing relevant images or icons around copy text can serve a useful purpose of drawing your reader’s eyes to your message but don’t overdo it.
Overall, the above tips are just a hand-full of things that you need to optimize your work in terms of readability and convert-ability. To paraphrase a common saying among writers, there is no good writing, only good re-writing.
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