I knew that good sentences have a rhythm to them before reading On Writing Well; however, I call it the flow of a sentence. I refer to it often when looking over the creative writings of others. On the other hand, I don’t always know what to change it to. When I write I use the thesaurus within Word at least once every two sentences. It’s quite easy to access, although it doesn’t have the versatility or features of Roget’s Thesaurus. It can’t tell me what adjectives, adverbs, and verbs go best with a noun I’ve looked up. It doesn’t tell me if I used the wrong spelling of a word. However, it does give me to tools to correct it myself without flipping through a bunch of pages trying to find a word.
I’ve been asked to proofread things in Word before, but if I don’t limit myself to just writing down suggestions I can’t finish it. I find too many little things to fix and in the end I accidentally loose the author’s original voice. That is if I finish proofreading at all. I have a couple of documents on my computer right now that I promised to proofread, but didn’t finish doing so. With my new knowledge of what not to do I may look them over again and actually succeed in giving it back. It may be months late in coming, but at least it will be done and the writer can finally improve.
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