Whenever I begin editing a new project, the first thing I do is create a checklist. The items on the list vary, depending on the nature of the project. A checklist for editing a novel will look very different from those used to edit academic journal articles or training materials. Based on the document's requirements, I create a list of items to check. It's good practice for anyone who has to review manuscripts, and I'd be lost without my checklist.

Why do the extra work? The first reason is because our eyes can't spot all the errors at once. It's easier to do multiple passes through a document, each time focusing on a different thing. The first and second passes through a document, I can decide whether the content and organization make sense without worrying about capitalization or punctuation. Also, although I advocate for having a dedicated editor, using a checklist helps you to distance yourself from your own work when there's no one else around to proof it. 

The checklist doesn't have to be long or complicated. Here are some sample items from a checklist I used to edit training materials:

• Is the document set up correctly for double-sided printing?
• How's the spacing on each page?
• Have titles been capitalized correctly? What about proper nouns?
• Are headers and footers accurate and consistent?
• Are internal headings consistent?
• In bulleted items, is the format correct and used consistently? Do the items all have a parallel structure?
• Are tables, figures, and visuals numbered correctly and consistently?
• Are numbers and acronyms correct and used consistently throughout?
• Is the document punctuated correctly?
• Are there misspellings?
• Are there grammatical errors?

The next time you have to edit your own work or someone else's, take a few minutes and create a simple checklist. You'll be glad you did.

What does Pride and Prejudice and The Hobbit have in common? They are both written in the third-person point of view (POV). POV is the perspective from which the story is told. Because POV is often challenging, Rose's Red Pen has featured posts over the summer about different points of view. Previous posts have examined first-person singular ("I"), first-person plural ("we"), and second-person ("you") points of view. For the final POV post, let's turn to the most common point of view in fiction: third person ("he/she").

Third-person POV varies by how much the narrator reveals to readers about the interior lives of other characters beyond the protagonist. The spectrum stretches from limited to omniscient. A third-person limited POV means the reader is limited to what the POV character knows. The Harry Potter series is a famous example; readers only know what Harry knows. This POV is popular in many murder mysteries, where readers find clues along with the detective and discover the killer only when the detective does.

Handling the third-person limited POV can be tricky for writers. A mistake I often see as an editor is when the POV character tells the reader what another character is thinking or feeling when the POV character has no way of knowing that. Often the problem can be solved by having a character do or say something that allows the POV character to draw a conclusion. (Other solutions are more inventive; in the Harry Potter series, the invisibility cloak and Pensieve are clever devices that allow Harry to witness events and experience the memories and feelings of others in a believable way.)

In the third-person omniscient POV, the narrator can show readers what all the characters are doing, thinking, and feeling, even if the POV character doesn't have this information. Some examples of this POV are Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. Omniscient narrators work well in epic stories or ones with many characters. A drawback to this POV is that readers are told too much rather than making their own discoveries based on what characters say and do.  

If a writer wants to hop into the minds of multiple characters, then often an omniscient narrator is established first, as in Elizabeth Strout's novel Amy and Isabelle. Otherwise, the convention is to wait for a scene or chapter break before switching to another character's point of view. If the writer hops between multiple points of view in the same scene, it can be jarring to readers.

Third-person POV also varies by how subjective or objective the narrator is. In a subjective point of view, the narrator can see inside a character's mind and shares those thoughts and feelings with the reader. In an objective POV, the narrator is like a camera, just recording actions. The effect is a detached, unbiased report. Examples of third-person objective POV are the Hemingway story "Hills Like White Elephants" and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.

Even though third-person is the most common POV in fiction, it's far from boring. Writers can experiment with limited or omniscient knowledge and objective or subjective narrators.

The dog days of August require a good summer read, something that combines sun and sand and beach. If the book is a gripping survival story too, with a girl as the protagonist, well, that's the whipped cream on the top of my frappe. Island of the Blue Dolphins meets all of those criteria, and I wanted to revisit this children's book to see how well it held up for me and what writers can learn from it today.

Island of the Blue Dolphins, by Scott O'Dell, was published in 1960 and won the John Newbery Award. The novel is based on the true story of a Native American girl in the 1800s who spent 18 years alone on an island off the coast of California. Her tribe abandons Karana when they flee the Russians approaching the island. Karana leaps off the boat to retrieve her younger brother.

As I reread the book, I was struck by its somewhat stilted style. I discovered a lot about what happened to Karana, but it was as if the character held me at arm's length when it came to how she felt. Karana is stoic and not prone to introspection; she does what she must to survive.

The distant narrative approach forced me to observe all the precise, accumulated details of Karana's daily life and draw inferences about her self-sufficiency and loneliness. Although I had to work harder as a reader, O'Dell did a wonderful job of showing rather than telling me what Karana's life was like. I remembered why I had found the book so moving when I was a girl.

Scott O'Dell thought of the book as a female Robinson Crusoe story. It is, but it's so much more too. It's also a coming-of-age story, and the book was ahead of its time in its examination of gender roles and what it means to live in harmony with nature. Karana makes hard decisions to achieve her own happiness, and even if I don't agree with all of them, I came away from the book once again respecting the character and her journey.

When I was writing plays, I loved the ellipsis. Those three little dots were my go-to punctuation to end a line of dialogue. They indicated a pause before a profound thought. They hinted at deep meaning, those stepping stones to infinity. They also hid that I couldn't figure out how to finish the line. If ellipses were good enough for playwright Harold Pinter (who used them to punctuate the famous "Pinter Pauses"), then those three dots were good enough for me.

The ellipsis serves two purposes.
1. It indicates where words have been omitted from a longer text.
Example: We the People of the United States ... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

2. The ellipsis indicates a trailing off at the end of a sentence. It's often used this way in dialogue. In the middle of a line, the ellipsis indicates a hesitation, and then the thought continues.
Examples:
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ...
"You can't possibly mean ..."
"I thought ... when he said he'd written the check ... well, that the bill was paid."

The ellipsis places high on Internet lists of grammatical peeves. Many of us don't know how to correctly space ellipses or what to do with them at the end of a sentence. Style guides aren't much help, because they differ in their advice. I favor this guidance because it's sensible and easy to remember: space the dots by replacing the ellipsis with a three-letter word, like "car." There should be a space before and after the word, with no spaces in between. Treat ellipses the same way.
Examples:
She bought a new car yesterday.
It was frightening ... I couldn't imagine what could be growling at the back of the closet.

If the ellipsis falls at the end of a complete sentence, then end that sentence with a period, insert a space, then insert the ellipsis to indicate where words have been omitted.
Example: We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. ... We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

To make an ellipsis, type three periods without spaces between them. In Microsoft Word, you can insert an ellipsis by using the "insert symbol" menu.

An ellipsis may not indicate a path to infinity, but it's still a pretty useful punctuation mark.