Sorry, but this is EXACTLY the kind of advice you get on the internet that no professional would ever suggest.
Think about it... you've got 100.000 in your novel and you're going to be doing heavy consideration of ALL of them?
This is like telling an athlete that he needs to carefully consider the placement of each foot during a game.
In real life, writing flows...it's not lego.
What you're concerned with is mainly how the thing reads, not violating the narrative voice of the story, catching obvious gross grammatical errors.
The main value of "crit" or "feedback" is getting a fresh view of how it reads.
I see you still want to expose me as a hack with your one-upmanship.
Let me first say this: Better critics than you tried this and worse. They failed. So, please save yourself the continued embarrassment.
Yes, I
do mean every single word for every single sentence. Novel, query letter, whatever. No professional would say this?
Gary Provost of
100 Ways to Improve Your Writing wrote a book on it. It's titled
Make Every Word Count: A Guide to Writing That Works—For Fiction and Nonfiction http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0898790409/the6ferrwritgrouLegend William Zinsser wrote in his
On Writing Well, "Notice the decisions that other writers make in their choice of words and be finicky about the ones you select from the vast supply. The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original." (page 34)
How about Stephen King? In
On Writing, King states, "Use active verbs and choose the right words ... cut and cull to create clean text." (pages 111 - 137 throughout)
Oh you said Internet! Sorry.
Nicholas Spark says this about cutting, editing, and word choice about
The Notebook, "I'll give you one example of the cutting, since many people ask about that. Toward the beginning of the novel, Noah mentions a book of poetry he'd carried with him in the war. In the first draft, I'd described an exciting "war" scene, complete with Noah getting caught behind enemy lines, disobeying orders, and heading back to find the book, only to get caught in a fire-fight, etc. It ran four pages, but after reading through the draft, I knew the scene was too long, since it was tangential to the primary story. I first cut the scene to three pages, then two, and finally got it down to a page. Yet, after additional readings, I still thought it was too long. It went from four paragraphs to three, then to two, and I finally got the scene down to a single paragraph. Pretty good cutting, right? After re-reading again, I still thought it was too long. It went from four sentences to three, three to two, then two to one.
The final sentence read, "It (meaning 'the book of poetry') had once taken a bullet for him."
http://www.nicholassparks.com/Novels/TheNotebook/Notes.htmlHow about Writer's Digest? Are they professional? I mean, they only published a couple hundred books and articles right? Consider this article entitled "4 Tips for Choosing the Right Word"
http://www.writersdigest.com/article/?p_ArticleId=5208Legend Amy Tan, author of
The Joy Luck Club is quoted to say, "We are the kind of people who obsess over one word ... "
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/amytan269348.htmlYes word choices, exact word choices, make a difference. Yes, choose each word with care. Yes, choose the best words for your prose.
In publishing, we call this craft 'line-by-line' editing. You check for all missteps to include watered and weak word choices.
You might write a book built from legos, but I will write a book built from the best a writer can be.
I advise my peers to do the same.
Wolfe
