Editing via Kindle

I mentioned that I was doing a read through of my manuscript (gosh that sounds pretentious to me, I need to figure out what to call the thing. I guess WIP is better, though whenever I think WIP, I think of either this song or this one.) I used my Kindle for it and, overall, it was a really good experience and I highly recommend it for people wanting to get a “feel” for their work that goes beyond the Word document.

Converting it was pretty easy (talked about that, already). Transferring it via my USB cord, also a snap. (Really, I’d worry about myself if it wasn’t, I do have a PhD in computers after all.) Reading it was a delight. Now, I love my Kindle, so that already predisposes me to enjoy reading something on in. But there were times during the process that the knowledge that this is something I wrote actually faded into the background and I was simply enjoying a good read.

Still, the point was also to catch some of the egregious errors that seem to plague my writing. (For instance, if my characters are not nodding their heads they are rolling their eyes. Sometimes they are doing both. This has now been fixed.) I don’t seem to catch it quite as easily in my Word doc though. So, when something jarred me on my read through, I started out highlighting it. Thankfully I stopped to try and fix some of my noted things after about four chapters. I found that I couldn’t always remember why I had highlighted the word or passage.

When I started back up, I switched my tactic and instead made a note. This was better because I could leave instructions about what I was disliking (word choice, missing a word, needing words deleted, whatever). For a little I did both the highlight and the note, but really, that ended up being overkill.

I was hoping that I’d be able to go into my clips file and then see in more detail what I needed to fix (e.g. some context or be able to click directly into that portion of the book – something). That would have made fixing the identified issues much easier. As it is, I’m just paging through looking for highlights and notes. When I find one, I scroll down to it, locate the appropriate place in my Word doc (ctrl-F for the win!), and fix away. Then I delete the highlight and/or note so I know it’s been resolved. It’s not glamorous, but it gets the job done.

So, given the clunky nature of fixing errors, you definitely want to wait to read through on your Kindle til you’re at a pretty fixed/stable place (thankfully, it turned out I was). Still, I think I caught more doing this than I would have reading through the Word doc again. (And hey, I saved myself some 300+ pages of paper. The tress most definitely thank me.)