The past week or so I’ve been working my way through my now cleaned-up (in terms of formatting) copy of Kissed by a Rose looking for any stupid errors or any small elements of style that could be improved.
In the first instance, I’ve done this by using Calibre to quickly convert the ePub to DocX, then running the DocX through the free version of Grammarly—which is great for finding these silly errors and suggesting small style improvements.
And while I haven’t just accepted every improvement/correction that the app has suggested, it’s proving to be quite an insight into the small mistake I make that are easy to miss (like missing words here and there, homophones and errant commas), but also into the types of words that I use too much.
Like ‘really’.
And “Actually”.
In my defence, a large proportion of the time I’m using both words is in dialogue and given that the characters are in their late teens in the late noughties, this is a choice because I think it’s a fair(-ish) reflection on how they would speak. But I was still surprised to see how much I’d used both words, as well as similarly redundant words, in the narrative text.
So I’m doing my best to cut out as many of them as I think best—not all of them, but a good proportion of those that fall outside of any dialogue will go.
