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What’s a ‘clean’ manuscript?

By clean, I mean no typos (typographical errors): incorrect spellings, missing or misplaced punctuation …

As well as reading it through, out loud preferably, you could use an editing tool such as ProWritingAid to polish your words. Or, there’s AutoCrit or Grammarly.

By clean, I also mean well structured and formatted. Check out this post for more on that.

Creating a clean manuscript: Fixing incorrect spellings

Finding your own spelling mistakes is hard work. You need to read each word, one at  time. Backwards, can help.

Scrivener offers a spelling checker. There are four options:

Make sure you’ve chosen the correct language! In System Preferences, I choose English, although there are also differences between UK spellings and US spellings.

So I also need to specify this … within the Auto-correction, System Text Preferences …

Creating a clean manuscript: Delete spaces that shouldn’t be there

To see whether you have spaces that shouldn’t be there, select View / Text Editing /Show Invisibles. Each spaces appears as a blue dot. Each ‘return’ as a backward P. The five spaces in front of the first word in sentence 1 shouldn’t be there!

Scrivener 3’s Text Tidying options include ‘Replace Multiple Spaces with Single Spaces’.

If you apply this to the text, in one go, it reduces 2 or more spaces to a single space.

The space at the start also needs to be deleted. Notice also a space that shouldn’t be there before the backward-P in sentence 3.

Removing these singles spaces in Scrivener needs to be done manually. Best not put them in, in the first place!

Creating a clean manuscript: Delete line spaces that shouldn’t be there

Spacing between paragraphs should be controlled through paragraph formatting, not by hitting ‘return’ twice.

Selecting Edit / Text Tidying / Remove Empty Lines Between Paragraphs removes them in a few seconds.

Questions? Need a helping hand? Want a demo?

To watch me go through the process of using Scrivener to write or edit a novel, or to ask any questions, book a Simply Scrivener Special.

To help me to prepare, you could also complete this short questionnaire.

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