Homonyms

I know you’re groaning because I’m using grammatical terms. We know what this is – it’s words that sounds the same but have different meanings.

Are you saying Huh? I hope not but if you are…

Question Mark On Colorful Paper

Here’s a few examples

You’re / Your

Its / It’s

There / They’re / Their

Now I can tell you when I write, these mess with me all the time. So I’m doing what I do best – writing about them. Doesn’t mean I’ll mess up less but I’ll at least share with others.

There are so many of these I cannot even begin to tell you them all. The three above are commonly done incorrectly as are many many more.

In the Wayfarer series for some reason I could not come up with console – meaning a scientific instrument consisting of displays and an input device. I came up with council, counsel and I’m sure there were other iterations. But not console. I knew what I wanted and I was pretty sure of the word but the correct spelling eluded me.

Now when I’m tooling along writing, I don’t always type the write word. I just get it down. I want to get the words on the page and get it out of my head.

How do I as an author fix this?

My first go to is spell check. I work in Word and the Editor they are now using gets its/it’s wrong all the time. It’s like it’s drunk. So you have to know your spell checker.

Read through. I do a read through of all my manuscripts as well as using the Editor / spell check.

If that doesn’t catch them, my beta and arc team will let me know if something is off.

Readers will also let an author know when something is wrong – my only hope is they let me know before they leave a review so I can correct it.

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