Sometimes readers respond to my rejection of a given word or spelling with the argument that it’s “in the dictionary.”

My response is that dictionaries are not scripture. Just because a word is in the dictionary does not mean that it’s an acceptable choice for all speakers and writers in all contexts. The recent discussion on mankind vs humankind certainly bears that out.

Then there’s the fact that more than one variety of “standard English” is spoken and written in the world. British speakers write honour where Americans write honor. Americans write the noun percent as one word; British speakers as two: per cent. Region and audience will determine which are the “correct” spellings.

A good dictionary is the writer’s indispensable tool. I consult both the OED and Merriam-Webster Unabridged in the process of writing every post. I do not, however, take the view that because a particular spelling is included as an entry or given as an alternate spelling that it is “just as good as” a more conventional word or spelling.

I’ll give just two words to illustrate: alright and irregardless. Both words have separate entries in both of my dictionaries.

alright: a frequent spelling of all right –OED

alright: in reputable use although all right is more common –Merriam-Webster

irregardless:probably blend of irrespective and regardless; [nonstandard] –Merriam-Webster

irregardless: in nonstandard or humorous use: regardless –OED

The spelling alright is to be found in Middle English. The Online Etymology Dictionary points out that in modern use the spelling is “attested since 1893.” Nevertheless, the spelling alright screams “incorrect” at me. I would never use it in my own writing, and it distracts me in the writing of others.

As for “irregardless,” I might use the word as a speech tag to characterize a fictional character, but I’d never use it in my own speech or writing. Other speakers and writers, on the other hand, have embraced the word.

Dictionaries, like spell checkers, are useful up to a point. The “point” is the place at which the writer’s background, education, personality, and purpose are called into play.

Without a single red underline, my spell checker permits me to write

I seen there faces threw the window.”

It’s up to me whether or not I want to leave it that way.

A lot of writing sites link to posts on the DailyWritingTips site. We like that. Sometimes they run a brief quotation followed by a link to the rest of the article on our site. I see nothing wrong with that.

Sometimes, however, they post an entire article on their sites, followed by attribution and a link to DWT. Apparently they are acting in good faith, imagining that including attribution makes it all right to reproduce the entire post. It isn’t. That’s copyright violation.

This week I happened across a site that not only publishes our posts in their entirety, but does so without attribution: leestringer.net (not linked for obvious reasons). Some of my posts are attributed to “Sweet Jane.”

There is a “Go to Source” link that appears after a Twitter icon at the far bottom of the posts. Perhaps that’s intended as a defense in case of being called on it.

The way our material is integrated into the overall design of the poaching website, the site’s readers probably don’t even notice the buried “source” link. It took me a while to find it, and I was looking.

Naturally this experience got me thinking about plagiarism.

Plagiarism is theft. It’s from Latin plagiarius meaning “kidnapper” or “plunderer.”

Inexperienced writers sometimes commit plagiarism unintentionally by paraphrasing badly, misquoting, or failing to attribute a quotation to its source.

Unscrupulous writers do it intentionally, in order to profit from the work of others.

Anyone who writes, or makes use of the writing of others, needs to become informed about copyright and fair use.

An excellent discussion of copyright infringement is Brad Templeton’s 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.

An academic take on plagiarism useful to students can be found on the University of Wisconsin-Platteville library site.

Few people now (with the possible exception of poets) write on paper.

For most of us, our thoughts take shape on screen, and our words exist as magnetic patterns on disk, rendered as phosphor dots, or the flat screen equivalent. Sometimes that’s the final form of the writing. It’s destined for the Web or another online destination, and may never exist in permanent form.

Of course, it has not always been this way. The only way of reading words, until recently was through marks on a writing surface such as paper, sometimes referred to derisively by techno-nerds as “sliced dead trees”.

This is the way we all learned to read, and many people still recommend proofreading long pieces of writing using printed output, since it comes more naturally to most than screen-based checking. For any long pieces of writing (”long” being over 1,000 words), I almost always print out my documents and sit down with a red pencil, away from the computer.

I’ve picked up some basic ideas in the course of years to deal with the problem of proofreading from paper. Some may work for you, some may not.

• Use Courier, or some other non-proportional typeface. Mistakes (especially punctuation errors) often seem to show themselves more often when your writing appears in this form. Don’t try to lay the piece out in its final format – concentrate on the words, not the appearance.

• Print out your work double-spaced, and leave wide margins at left and right for comments and corrections. Number the pages, especially if you print double-sided.
• Don’t make the corrections on the computer as you find them. Move away from the computer, or at least close the file. When you have finished proofreading the entire piece, make the corrections on the computer, crossing them off on paper as you go.
• Read your work out loud. It forces a higher level of concentration than silent reading.
• Use a red (or at least a color other than black) pen or pencil to mark up your text. When you come to make the corrections on the computer, use another color (say blue) to check off the corrections as you make them.
• Take the trouble to learn the standard proofreading signs and symbols. It means that you will be able to work on other people’s work, and they on yours when necessary.

• For proofreading (i.e. basic spell-checking in context), read backwards (i.e. from the bottom of the page upwards). Since the words come in an unfamiliar and unnatural order, you are more likely to find mistakes than if
  you read forwards and read what you expect to see, instead of what’s already there.

As I say, you may not find that all these work for you, but all are worth trying at least once.

Hugh Ashton was born in the UK, and now lives in Kamakura, Japan, where he has lived for 21 years. He works as a writer and journalist, specializing in IT- and financial-related work. His first novel, Beneath Gray Skies, an alternate history novel dealing with a Confederacy in the 1920s, is available through Amazon, etc. Details here.

This is a guest post by Laura Hamby. If you want to write for Daily Writing Tips check the guidelines here.

Everyone has their methods. I’ve read revision checklists all over the Internet, but still that didn’t stop me from coming up with my very own checklist.

Why? Why not? Who knows better than I how I write? And while I will confess to incorporating items from the checklists of other authors, especially those who write in the genre I do (because I’m a big fan of learning from others), I also know the areas I need to pay attention to on the second/third, et cetera, go-round on my manuscript.

The idea is not to revise your voice right out of your work. It is possible to do that if you’re not careful. You also don’t want to revise yourself so you wind up sounding like the person whose checklist you’ve borrowed for your own use. So, what did I consider when putting my personalized checklist together?

I’m glad you asked.

1. Things my critique partner pings me on regularly. In the beginning, I had a crit partner who would whack my knuckles with her cyber ruler about head hopping. Stay in ONE point of view? It took me a while to figure it out, but eventually I caught on and now when I head hop, I KNOW what I’m doing. These things are subject to change as you grow as a writer.

2. Things I personally think I can and should do better. Several years ago, I gave myself a mission to use better, stronger verbs whenever and wherever I could. I took baby steps in the beginning, I’d write, then go back and check for passive, lackluster verbs. After a while, I moved on to refusing to use a wimpy verb in the rough draft, even if it meant I stared at the screen until I came up with something better. I like to think now that I’ve about got this licked—the verbs with verve come more easily than the verveless verbs now. As with number one, the items on this portion of your checklist will change, which is exactly what you want, as it shows that you’re growing as a writer.

3. Feedback I’ve received from editors. Hey, I figure if I’m lucky enough to get a rejection complete with what worked and what didn’t work for the editor, that’s as positive a rejection as you can get. And boy, how stupid would I be to discount what the editor has to say?

4. Those pesky generic things that should be on every revision checklist. You know, fun things like spelling, grammar, punctuation, looking for words that are words but are the wrong words. Example: “The hen is mightier than the sword.” These are what I like to call ‘Fun Typos’ because they often are worth at least a weak giggle, if not a full belly laugh when you find them.

5. Compositional/conventional aspects. Plot, flow, pacing, all threads tied off in a pretty bow, and so forth.

6. Have I stayed true to my voice? We all have a unique voice, but sometimes, it’s possible for it become lost when we try to be too clever or when we fight our way through a scene as if it were a paper bag we had to escape from using nothing but a dull toothpick. This is the part that is truly personal, above and beyond the conventions, like using periods to indicate the end of a statement, that we must observe. What questions can you ask yourself on your checklist that will resonate with how you write and what you write in regard to remaining true to your voice?

Feel free to add or subtract from this list, and hey, if you come up with something to consider for creating your own personal revision checklist, let me know. I’m a big believer in being teachable and learning as much as I can about the craft of writing.

Laura Hamby writes romantic comedy, has been e-published and enjoys her quest for self-directed continuation learning in writing. Please visit her on the web: http://www.freewebs.com/laurahamby/ or her blog at http://laurahamby.blogspot.com .

Writing tools can affect your style. In the days of quill and dip pens, the length of sentences (or at least, phrases) was apparently determined by the amount of ink held by the pen, and prose rhythm was dictated by this simple physical constraint.

Fountain pens extended the scope of the writer. No longer did (s)he have to pause in the composition of the sentence, reach over to the inkwell and use those few seconds to determine what to write next. Sentences could flow for ever, like those of Henry James. But even with a fountain pen, revisions don’t come easily.

In Lamb House, Rye, where James lived for many years, some galley proofs of his works are on display, covered with major handwritten amendments. Whole paragraphs deleted and added, sentences turned on their heads, etc. No publisher today, even with modern technology, would accept such major revisions to a book at galley stage. It would appear, though, that typesetting really does crystallize a writer’s thoughts, and give a firm foundation for the next stage in the writing process.

Of course, many authors used typewriters when they became available. Mark Twain, a neophile and early adopter, wrote:

The machine has several virtues. I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don’t muss things or scatter ink blots around. Of course it saves paper.

And as someone who grew up doing a lot of writing (books, articles, etc.) on a typewriter (manual Olivetti portable, and later an electric Facit golfball), I have to agree with Samuel Clemens. Mind you, corrections were tricky. I used a lot of correction fluid and paper, and rewriting a whole sentence often meant starting again from scratch on a new page.

The sheer drudgery and physical labor involved in hitting typewriter keys (less with electric than a manual, of course) meant you had to think carefully about what you wrote. Planning a whole page in advance (or at least a paragraph) wasn’t uncommon. Certainly you tended to write a sentence before putting it down on paper, because it was too much trouble to recast it once it had been typed.

Of course, all this refers to the first draft. Creating a second draft was often a question of starting again from scratch, or a literal “cut and paste” job.

Another way of writing books was (still is for some) dictation to a shorthand secretary or a dictation machine. Dictation can produce long flowing streams of consciousness, poor style, and very clumsy or sloppy plotting in the worst cases, not to mention novels that are parodies of the author’s own style.

But then came word-processors. But that’s for another week. In the meantime, your exercise for the week is to look at some older pieces of writing, and see if you can reconstruct how the authors got the words out of their heads onto paper.