Month: March 2025

by Gayle Bartos-Pool

Editing is a major endeavor for any writer. Even if you hire it done or your publisher actually provides one, you need to go over your work a few times to make sure the story you thought you were telling made it to the page.

Before I published my first novel, I hired a professional editor. Back then, most publishers were dropping their editors at an alarming rate because they thought the writer would do a good enough job and the cost of an editor on staff was too much for the publisher, so they were let go.

The editor I hired had worked at a large publishing firm. She’s the one who told me about all the layoffs. I paid a tidy sum and expected her work to be good, if not excellent. I got back my manuscript and happened to ask my sister-in-law who worked as an editor on a large newspaper in Orange County California if she would mind going over the pages. She said yes, did the job, and found numerous errors the overrated editor hadn’t found. I paid my sister-in-law $50 just to be nice. I had paid the “professional” $1800.00. This was back in 1996, even though it took eight years before I got that book into print.

I did my own editing after that. I know there were errors in my subsequent books, but like I say: Only God is perfect.

Recently, I happened to pick up one of my spy novels and decided to read it. I wanted to send a copy to someone whose book I had read and wanted to make sure the book wasn’t too full of errors. I did find a few mistakes during that quick read, but they might be overlooked if the reader didn’t pay too close attention to every comma.

I enjoyed reading my book after all these years and decided to read one of the other books in the spygame series, but this time I let my computer read it aloud to me. I was still watching the screen as it was reading my words, but that’s when I started seeing Spell Check underline a word or two…then it wanted me to add a comma here or delete another comma there or change a phrase or use a different word. I actually agreed with a few of those changes, but I was having a problem with the computer wanting me to add way more commas than we were told to do back in 9^th grade English. I didn’t remember old Mrs. York telling us not to use a comma before a “but” in a sentence,,, but the new Spell Check didn’t want the comma.

There were some words that had an obvious typo, but I was surprised I hadn’t caught them myself, but then again, when we read our own work, we know what we were going to say and we “read” it even if it’s not there. That’s why in my newer books I do have the computer read my work back to me so I can hear what I wrote. Many times, I would find a typo that I hadn’t seen when I read through the first draft of the book in actual printed form. When I wrote my first few books which included the three spy novels, I didn’t have the luxury of that audio editor to help me.

So, flash forward several decades and all those computer tools have made the editing somewhat better. I still have errors in my books, but hopefully fewer.

But wait! Sometimes the computer program might be a stickler for “correct English” when you want your words to have more of a regional accent or colorful flair. I continued letting the new Spell Check go over those old words and I started finding things it wanted me to change like in the phrase “everything was socked in” referring to the weather, but AI came up with “shocked in.” Then there was my word “noose,” and it wanted “nose.” Or “chicken coop” was changed to “chicken cop.” “Sliver” to “silver.” “Antiaircraft flak” to “flake.”

“Houston, we have a problem…”

There were dozens more of these stupid mistakes the AI “genius” was making. They weren’t just possible words you might want to use which more or less meant the same thing. These were totally incorrect.

Fortunately, the AI Spell Checker wasn’t making these changes without my Okay like it does on my cell phone or Kindle Tablet, so I didn’t let it have free reign. And as I was making the changes I thought were correct, I still had the WORD program read back my words because hearing them still allowed me to make sure that’s what I wanted to say. I re-edited those three spy books and reissued them this year. Hopefully most of the mistakes were corrected…even with all the blasted commas.

So, be aware of the little goblins hiding in your computer. They might have less education than you do. In fact, I never saw an AI sitting in one of my English classes in high school or college. But I certainly discovered that these AI creatures aren’t writers, because a computer program has no imagination. If you don’t believe me, sit in front of your computer without touching the keypad and tell it to write a novel. Without the human element, human imagination or human touch, or without Internet access to hundreds, if not thousands, of books already written by humans, that conglomeration of motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD and HDD can create nothing. Try unplugging your computer with its AI capability and see what it can do by itself. I don’t need to be plugged in or have my batteries replaced in order to tell a story. And my stories are the ones I created, not by a machine that cobbles together bits and pieces of other work and then mashes it all together in an incoherent jumble.

A computer helps, but the human heart, brain and talent will always be better.

  Write On!