Given Penny's post, here is another pet peeve of mine...

[Aminar]

Yep, definitely a first draft.  Poised to hit 100K tonight though.  (Of a planned roughly 150K)  I'm figuring I'll learn how to edit after I learn to write.

[meg_evonne]

I wondered if there was a 'historical' trend on the use of 'seem', so I searched some books on Amazon. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Also, I've been calling it a modifier, while it is obviously a linked verb. Sorry about that guys.

Dead beat  24..
Small Favor 33
Proven Guilty 37
White Knight 22
Patrick Rothfuss  Wise Man’s Fear… 148 in 739 plus pages.
Brandon Sanderson Way of Kings 129 in 867 plus pages
George RR Martin  Game of Thrones 82 in 709 plus pages
DaVinci Code Brown 23 in 546 plus pages
John Irving  National Book Award Imaginary Girlfriend  9
Charles Dickens short A Christmas Carol…..  1 
Tolkien’s Two Towers…. 74 in 396 plus pages

I found it interesting that one of the epics that I listed used it as one character's dialog quirk trait, as in 'It would seem...", which I found cool.

And Aminar.... you got it. congrats on 100K that is fantastic!

[LizW65]

How do you search a manuscript (in Word) for a specific word, such as seem?  I'm curious.

[meg_evonne]

How do you search a manuscript (in Word) for a specific word, such as seem?  I'm curious.

It's a trick I learned from Priscellie. Go to Amazon.com and search the book. If it has the 'look inside' arrow, click on the cover and there will be a search box for words. Then it will bring up all the words you enter and the passages so you can go to that page to read. You can type phrases as well.  Not all books have the feature, usually only the older ones.

You can search your word docs by hitting ctrl and f at the same time. A box will pop up called Find and Replace. If you click on find it will bring them up and you can page through them. If you click replace, you can replace a word with another through out the doc. Love this little feature when I change the name of a character halfway through a book.  CAUTION: If you enter a word that is contained within another (like search other, it will bring up another) but it will only replace the word so use with extreme care when you are near the end of editing your work! You might never find an error that will pop glaringly out of the page.

Part of my manuscript scrunity includes searches: for 'ly'; for modifiers like 'most' and 'always'; passive verb usage trends by searching 'had', frequency of 'said'--just as examples of how it can be used.  I just read a review for an author that I liked and several people on the audible reviews said they had never heard the word, "said" so many times!  Eek. Yes, your mind will slip over it when reading, but hearing it in your ear over and over would become very dis-satisfying.

Also when I'm writing 1st POV, it is extremely helpful to search out "I". One agent told me that my character was full of herself. Thankfully, rather than be upset, I asked him what he meant. I simply abused "I" and it literally dripped all over my first 50.  Eek... See you learn all the time and yes, it was probably as irritating as He** to read it with that many of them. Do you know how hard it is to write 1st without a lot of "I"s--very difficult. Since the search highlights them, it is easy to shrink your manuscript down to ten pages per view on your computer and see where clumps of them pop up.

[Quantus]

It's a trick I learned from Priscellie. Go to Amazon.com and search the book. If it has the 'look inside' arrow, click on the cover and there will be a search box for words. Then it will bring up all the words you enter and the passages so you can go to that page to read. You can type phrases as well.  Not all books have the feature, usually only the older ones.

You can search your word docs by hitting ctrl and f at the same time. A box will pop up called Find and Replace. If you click on find it will bring them up and you can page through them. If you click replace, you can replace a word with another through out the doc. Love this little feature when I change the name of a character halfway through a book.  CAUTION: If you enter a word that is contained within another (like search other, it will bring up another) but it will only replace the word so use with extreme care when you are near the end of editing your work! You might never find an error that will pop glaringly out of the page.

If you click the "More" option at the bottom of the window, it gives you several check box options such as "Match Case", Find Whole Words Only" Ignore Punctuation Characters" and others that help protect you from some of those dangers.  It also opens options that you search for specific formatting, Special Characters (such as Paragraph Mark).  On later Word Versions there is a "sounds like" option, that is great for trying to find that obscure quote you mostly remember but cant seem to get verbatim, as well as a "Find all word forms" for those words that don't conjugate uniformly.

I would not Survive without my Find/Replace   

[LizW65]

Ah, okay, I figured it out.  Duh!!
I found twenty-eight uses of "seem" or some permutation thereof in my own manuscript of 117,000 words.  Sixteen are in dialogue, which I assume is okay.(?)
There are a few more I can probably cut or change.

[meg_evonne]

Ah, okay, I figured it out.  Duh!!
I found twenty-eight uses of "seem" or some permutation thereof in my own manuscript of 117,000 words.  Sixteen are in dialogue, which I assume is okay.(?)
There are a few more I can probably cut or change.

I don't honestly remember anything sticking out when I read your CBB; so now I think we've managed to make you paranoid. Are you referring to your new manuscript? No one can actually say yes or no to you without reading, because of the subjective nature of the useage, but I would fully trust your own instincts and that is a tiny number. I doubt you have any problems at all.  Relax, my friend and hugs!!!!  And keep me posted on your agent quest.


edited to remove an overwhelmingly horrific number of exclamation marks for 3:54PM in the afternoon--or any time of day actually.

[LizW65]

I don't honestly remember anything sticking out when I read your CBB; so now I think we've managed to make you paranoid. Are you referring to your new manuscript?

It's the murder mystery I'm currently querying; completed prior to the self-pubbed book but edited several times since then.  Don't worry; I'm not getting paranoid!  I actually have quite a lot of confidence in the MS.