Editing: Refining your ideas by mutilating your writing

Editing is almost invariably manipulative, intrusive, artificial, and compromising: red-penciling, cutting up, throwing away, rewriting. And mostly throwing away. For this process, follow the standard advice about writing: be vigilant, ruthless; be orderly, planned; keep control, don’t lose your head. At last it is appropriate to sit, ponder, furrow your brow, not write, try to think of a better word, struggle for the exact phrase, try to cut out “dead wood,” and make up your mind what you really mean: all the activities which ruin your writing if engaged in too soon. – Peter Elbow, Writing without Teachers

So many students come to the writing center wanting to “just edit and proofread” their writing. I’ve learned not to laugh, but I still often smile when a student says that.

Editing and proofreading are not quick processes. At this stage of writing, people pay line editors and copy editors to refine that writing. And that work takes hours. I know because I’ve done it, with my own writing as well as others’ writing. It takes hours because editing doesn’t just mean correcting; it can involve condensing, removing, changing, or even adding components to the writing. Drafting and revision can still happen at this stage as well, especially at the sentence or paragraph level.

While other people can edit your work for you, sometimes that is not feasible or desirable. Even if you want to get your work edited by someone else, you can save yourself money (and a copyeditor’s frustration!) if you take the time to edit your writing on your own first. Here are five ways to edit your own writing.

Target-editing

In working with multiple writers—novice and advanced—I’ve found that writers have individualized patterns of error that occur repeatedly in a piece of writing. Teaching a writer to pay attention to those patterns gives them a place to start editing their work.

For example, I overuse “there is” and “there are,” so my sentences often sound redundant when they’re really not; my pronouns are often ambiguous; I overuse passive voice; I use phrasal verbs when strong verbs would be better, and I use lots of lists and dyads. Other than my habit of using pronouns without antecedents, all my other “mistakes” aren’t grammatical—they’re just not the best writing choices because they result in dense, redundant prose that is a drag to read!

Rather than manually going through my manuscript (a tedious process), I use Microsoft Word’s “find all” tool to identify where these things occur in my manuscript, and then I’ll revise sentence-by-sentence as they show up.

Target-editing is often what we do in the writing center. In a 30- or 50-minute session, we can’t get through an entire 12 to 15-page paper. Instead, we look for patterns in the client’s writing, helping them become aware of those patterns so they can identify and correct them on their own. Do they have problems with run-ons? Are they overusing a coordinating conjunction? Are they using passive voice when active voice would be more effective, or vice versa? Do they keep slipping into second person? Is the tense consistent? By the end of our session, a client often knows not just what to look for but how to revise them—and they feel empowered that they can identify and fix these things on their own.

Read aloud

I had been staring at and tweaking my chapter for days. I finally started reading it aloud, and suddenly I was discovering wrong prepositions, mistakes in subject-verb agreement, and even the wrong word (dang homonyms!). I wanted to berate myself for making such novice mistakes in my writing—don’t I point these things out to students day in and day out? Why can’t I banish them from my own work?—but in reality, I was just like any other writer and prone to make mistakes and not see them because my brain filled in what I knew should be there.

If you feel like your brain is still filling in what should be there but isn’t, you can have someone read your work aloud to you. I will often do this with a client in a coaching session if they feel they’ve just looked at their work for far too long. I read exactly what is on the page, and soon the client is jumping in to break up a long sentence, change a pronoun, or ask about the syntax of an awkward sentence.

Glossing

So many students come into the writing center declaring that they’ve looked at their paper so much that even reading it aloud or listening to someone read it to them isn’t helping them find their mistakes. That is when I ask them to read their manuscript backwards, starting with the last sentence.

Reading a manuscript backwards out loud means that your brain can understand each sentence as an isolated unit. You can then evaluate whether the sentence is working or not, or if the syntax needs to be changed.

Reading backwards is tedious—that is why students tend to balk when I make that suggestion—but especially if they’re having problems with run-on sentences or fragments, reading backwards makes it easier for them to see these because their brain isn’t filling in the missing details for them. If you’re going to read something backwards, make an event of it. I brew myself a cup of tea, print out my document, use a purple pen, sit in a sunny space, and read aloud. Sometimes I have a sheet of paper that I cover the manuscript with so that I can just focus on each sentence and I’m not scanning above. 

Alternatively, you can put each sentence on its own line. This formatting also visually separates the sentences so that they stand alone (kudos to the student coach who suggested this strategy in a coach meeting recently!)

Use Track Changes

Like I mentioned before, I am a very visual person. When I edit my own work, I will often use Microsoft Word’s track changes so I can easily see what changes I have made to my document. This allows me to see which parts of a document I have already edited, and it tells me, visually, how much I’ve already done or what changes I’ve already made, keeping me on track to finish editing the document. Editing is also about choice, and so sometimes I want to think about a choice before I finalize it. Track changes lets me see where I have made choices.

Before accepting all my changes, I will often use the “show minimal mark-up” view to see if I’ve missed anything. Sometimes all the mark-up can obscure mistakes that I may have introduced into my writing without meaning too or missed because of all the mark-up.

Edit on a printed copy

Instead of editing on your computer, edit from a printed copy. I know—you’re killing trees, ink is expensive, or you may not have a printer available to you. If you don’t have these resources, you have the other options above. But there usually comes at least two points when I’m editing my own work where I just can’t do any more of the above. Actually holding printed copies of my work does wonders. Suddenly it becomes easy to see where sentence syntax needs work, or wrong words suddenly pop off the page in a way they didn’t before.

Conclusion

Editing is work. It takes a long time and involves lots of decisions about what is or isn’t working in your manuscript at the sentence level. If you edit your work too soon, you will ruin it—like Peter Elbow described. But once you have taken the time to draft and revise your manuscript, editing it makes your message shine.