A couple of weeks ago I received the Amazon Kindle I’d ordered weeks earlier. It was worth the wait.
I was in the middle of editing two different documents, and may I say that sitting down with the hard copy, some ice water, a red pen, and a Kindle makes editing faster and easier. Not the picky, picky editing and proofing: that takes time. But when I have a question about a word in terms of capitalization or punctuation, I have two built-in dictionaries that serve me well.
As soon as I opened up my Kindle and saw the dictionaries, I knew that I also needed a thesaurus, and I downloaded a dandy: Doubleday Roget’s. It works when I need to find a word better suited to the reading audience. Then I surfed Kindle’s Store for a good style guide, and came up with a great compromise: The Yahoo Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World, which is primarily written for the Web, but many of the writing rules apply nicely to print publications…in terms of capitalization, punctuation, and general usage.
Sometimes I edit using my computer screen, but I always prefer final edits on hard copy, and now I can sit down and dig into my work instead of saving much of it for a time when I can refer to my online Visual Thesaurus or one of my print style guides.
I plan to read some fiction as well, but right now, Kindle is a dandy, lightweight workhorse. Should work for writers as well…