If you counted three, try again.

Fortunately, Microsoft Word identifies potential spelling and grammatical errors. Unfortunately, it’s wrong often enough that I tend to ignore the colored lines and squiggles indicating mistakes. I suspect others do as well.

I was reluctant to hire an editor for my novel because I wasn’t sure it was worth the money for a manuscript I thought was already well edited. I had read it three times and made changes/corrections each time. I felt it was as good as it was going to get. Then, I got scared. I’m a newbie author. I want readers to get their money’s worth. The novel needs to be darn near error free for me to feel right about selling it. I asked my publisher how much it would cost for editing, and the price was much lower than I expected—as low as my own editing prices had been. I recalled the saying, “You get what you pay for,” yet my clients had been happy with my work. I said yes. Two people would edit: one looking for holes in the story, and the other looking mainly for grammar and punctuation errors.

I was surprised by the number of obvious mistakes I’d made! I’d used a homonym instead of the correct word, left words out of sentences, and forgotten quotation marks. I even found a few errors the editors missed! I was tasked with accepting or rejecting each of the editors’ hundreds of suggestions, and that’s when I started to doubt myself.

When the editor suggested I change “meantime” to “meanwhile,” I looked up “meantime” in the dictionary to discover it was defined as “meanwhile.” Confused by why she wanted the word changed, I then checked for previous and later uses of “meantime” in the text to see if I was over-using it. Even though I thought “meantime” was perfectly fine, I changed it because I figured an editor knew better than I did. I made several changes to the text based on her word preferences.

When the editor corrected “bola” tie to “bolo” tie, I was hit with an epiphany. I live in Arizona. I know our state tie is the bola tie. She lives in Canada. If she doesn’t know about bola ties, why didn’t she research them? For that matter, what was her issue with “meantime”? Why had I assumed her suggestions were better than my own writing? Had she taken courses or earned certifications? I didn’t know. I went back and reversed some of the changes she’d suggested. I was grateful for the errors she’d found but not for her personal preferences.

Hiring an editor saved me much embarrassment. It also taught me to be careful. I gained some confidence to stand up for my word choices and punctuation, and I learned to scrutinize each suggestion but to choose the option that kept my work my own.

©Sherrie J. Lyons, September 2023