I am posting this to help folks with their own self-editing process. I’m not putting it up here for debate, just FYI. I don’t agree with all of it, either, but these are simple and damn good starting places for novice writers (which 99% of us here are, even if we like to think we aren’t.) I’ll leave it up for as long as it’s useful for folks who want tips for improvement OR until the pedants, curmudgeons, and trolls muddy up the comments for everyone.
These are not mine. I provided the links to the full articles.
10 Passes: What to Look Out For When Editing
https://writingcooperative.com/how-to-m … 72511edaca
Most articles on editing seem to offer only a few tricks. I have yet to come across a comprehensive editing guide that tells me about the parts of a written piece. To fill that gap, I’ve put together a list of the major areas of improvement.
You should make 10 passes through your entire piece, focusing on each one of these areas one at a time.
1 Spelling: Fix your typos. Nothing catches the critical eye of the reader like a spelling mistake.
2 These should be the first and easiest thing to fix. If you struggle with your vs you’re, or there vs their vs they’re, remember that an apostrophe is a contraction, which means it stands in for a missing letter. So you’re is short for you are. It’s is short for it is.
3 Also, if you use both systems of spelling—British and American—choose one and stick to it.
4 Basic grammar: Sound out your sentences to check if they sound weird. Make sure your verbs agree with your subjects. Use punctuation correctly, and use complete sentences.
5 Once you master basic rules, don’t be afraid to break them creatively. For example, use a phrase as a sentence to add emphasis, such as “Let yourself bleed on the page. Red.”
6 Tense agreement: Perfect use of tenses falls under advanced grammar, but getting it right is one of the best ways to provide the feeling of continuity in your writing. If you are writing in the past tense, continue to write in the past tense throughout, unless you are jumping across times. If you are, make sure to indicate that with your structure and flow (see below).
7 Active voice: In general, active voice sounds stronger than passive voice, because it implies doing vs being done to. For example, consider “James gambled his life away on one bad deal.” vs “James’ life was gambled away in one bad deal”. Which one has more impact?
8 Structure and sectioning: It bothers me that Medium won’t let me create paragraphs in this numbered list. Your writing needs to be digestible—no walls of text. Use paragraphs liberally, and vary paragraph lengths. Make sure that every major idea has its own section, and any idea-switch is given its own paragraph.
9 Flow, length, and variance: Flow is that thing that every pretentious writer talks about but never explains, right? Well, here’s one pretentious writer spilling the dirt. Flow is how your sentences connect to each other. If a sentence feels right after the previous one, and leads into the next, then it is in flow.
10 A piece that lacks flow feels abrupt in places. You want to avoid that—the more a reader falls into the flow, the better chance they won’t click away or close the book.
11 Flow can be achieved by A) using transitions to connect your sentences, B) structuring your ideas logically, and C) mixing up the lengths of sentences and ideas to keep the reader engaged. I would put a helpful image here, but Medium won’t let me, so see the end of this section instead.
12 Descriptive words: Any editing guide will tell you to use more descriptive verbs and adjectives. Writing is storytelling. To make up for the gestures and facial expressions that you cannot implement, use bright words.
13 For example, “She walked over to my side.” Did she? Or did she shuffle over because she was hesitant? Or did she gambol because she was carefree? Or did she rush, or did she sneak? How was she feeling? Show ideas and behavior with better verbs and adjectives.
14 Highlights and formatting: Medium is gorgeous, and part of its beauty lies in its simplicity. You don’t have 6 heading sizes, you have 2. You cannot re-align text. However, that also limits you. Wherever you choose to write, use the available formatting options to keep your text interesting. On Medium, that means a lot of bold, italic, and heading text, like I’ve used in this article.
15 We’re in a new age of writing: attention is a precious resource. Sticking to old ideals about how a reader should behave will get you a half-read piece. Make it easy on your readers by being creative with formatting, and highlighting your important thoughts and points.
16 Shortening and Optimizing: Unlike me, you want to cut down your piece as much as you can. Efficiency is always appreciated, and your reader doesn’t want to read things that are repetitive or boring.
17 One harsh exercise says you should force yourself to cut your piece by 20%—this will teach you what is actually necessary and what is not.
18 Once-over: Always do a final read-through to ensure you haven’t missed any glaring mistakes, and that you enjoyed reading your piece.
Image mentioned in 6. Flow, Length, and Variance
Why I Make 5 Passes: My Personal Editing Process
Ideally, you want to be able to give every aspect of your writing its own time and attention. The more focus you give to each pass, the better your writing will ultimately be.
However, a lot of “helpful” articles fail here: they give you the ideal practice, without considering personal limitations. If the advice is not practical, it’s of no help to anyone.
Listen, editing is an obviously tiring process. I don’t have the time, motivation, or patience to make that many passes, and I assume you don’t either. So here is what my personal process currently looks like:
1 First, I do one quick pass for spelling, grammar, and tense. This is my strength, so it takes me maybe 10 minutes to go through a 1000 word piece. During this pass, I usually scan for descriptive adjectives and verbs as well.
2 If I feel particularly motivated, I scan my article for passive voice (using software. See the Making it Easier section). Usually, I skip this step.
3 Next, I take my time to analyze structure, flow, and variance. This has been my biggest area of improvement in the last year. I’ll move entire sections around if it feels better. Any remaining changes to adjectives and verbs happen during this pass.
4 Then, I make one quick pass to cut extraneous words and highlight strong statements with bold or italic styling.
5 Finally, I do one quick read-through to catch any glaring issues.
The most important lesson you can take away from this article is this: create an editing checklist that suits you. Some writers are good with 3 passes, some revise upward of 15 times. At present, I’m happy with 5.
It is true the more you edit, the better your writing becomes. But you must not forget that perfectionism is a thing that exists.
25 Editing Tips for Tightening Your Copy
https://thewritelife.com/edit-your-copy/
Writers rarely spit out their best copy on the first draft. (If you meet a writer who claims to have the secret for doing so, please let the rest of us know.) First drafts — and second drafts and sometimes thirds — exist to hash your ideas out on paper. After you’ve revised your book, story, blog post or article until you can revise no more, you just hand it off to your editor to clean up, right?
Well, that’d be ideal. But most of us don’t have the luxury of hiring an expensive editor to review our personal blog post. And since procrastination is the writer’s best friend, you probably don’t have time to even ask a fellow writer pal take a quick peek for errors.
And so, it falls to you to be your own editor. Is it really possible edit your own work when all the words you just finished writing are so precious? Yes! It can be done — and for the sake of making your writing stand out, it must be done. Grab your red pen, pull up your most recently saved draft, and get to work with these 25 tips to tighten your own copy.
1. Cut long sentences in two
I’m not talking about run-on sentences. Many long sentences are grammatically correct. But long sentences often contain several ideas, so they can easily lose the reader’s focus because they don’t provide a break, leading readers to get stuck or lose interest, and perhaps the reader might get bored and go watch TV instead.
See what I mean? If you spot a comma-heavy sentence, try to give each idea its own sentence.
2. Axe the adverbs (a.k.a. -ly words)
Adverbs weaken your copy because these excess words are not truly descriptive. Rather than saying the girl runs quickly, say she sprints. Instead of describing the cat as walking slowly, say he creeps or tiptoes. The screen door didn’t shut noisily, it banged shut.
Find a more powerful verb to replace the weak verb + weak -ly adverb combo.
3. Stick to one voice
Sometimes it’s necessary to use both first and second person, but that can be jarring for readers. For example, you might start your introduction talking about yourself, then switch halfway through the piece and start addressing the reader. Try to stick to “I” voice or “you” voice throughout one piece of writing.
And if you must switch, start with one and finish with the other. Don’t move back and forth between the two. Your readers will get lost.
4. Remove extra punctuation
A powerful hyphen here and a thought-provoking semicolon there can be effective. But a piece of writing littered with all sorts of punctuation — parentheses, colons, ellipses, etc. — doesn’t flow well.
Oftentimes, you can eliminate these extra pieces of punctuation with commas or by ending a sentence and starting a new one — and that makes your writing that much stronger.
5. Replace negative with positive
Instead of saying what something isn’t, say what it is. “You don’t want to make these mistakes in your writing” could be better stated as “You want to avoid these mistakes in your writing.” It’s more straightforward.
If you find negative statements in your writing that contain don’t, shouldn’t, can’t or another such word, find a way to rewrite them without the “not.” That will probably mean you need to find a more powerful verb.
6. Replace stuffy words with simple ones
Some people think jargon makes their writing sound smart, but you know better. Good writing does not confuse readers. If they need to grab a dictionary to finish a sentence, your writing has room for improvement.
To get your point across, use words people are familiar with. The English language has thousands of words. You can certainly find a shorter or more common word in your thesaurus than a jargony one.
7. Remove redundancies
You don’t need to say the exact same thing with two words. Did you catch the redundant words in that sentence? Here’s a better version: you don’t need to say the same thing with two words.
Brand new, advance planning, basic necessities… the list of these common phrases is longer than this blog post. Check out About.com’s 200 Common Redundancies and then start snipping!
Sometimes sneaky redundancies are separated by an “and.” If you say your sentences are straightforward and to-the-point, they are neither. You don’t need both words. Your sentences are straightforward. Or, your sentences are to-the-point.
8. Reduce prepositions
Though prepositions (of, in, to, for, etc.) are helpful little words, they make sentences more lengthy because they cannot stand alone. Prepositions need lots of friends. By cutting the preposition and the words that follow, you can cut three, four or even five words. Sometimes a prepositional phrase can be replaced with just one more direct word, or cut completely.
An easy way to cut prepositions is to look for opportunities to make something possessive. The car of your neighbor is really just your neighbor’s car.
9. Cut “in order to”
You never need it. If you’re going to the kitchen in order to make a sandwich… Your sentence could be tighter. Because you’re really going to the kitchen to make a sandwich.
That “in order to” makes it take a millisecond longer to arrive at the meaty part of the sentence, which means your story is dragging more than it needs to.
10. Don’t use “start to”
Did you start to walk the dog, or did you walk the dog? Is the car starting to roll down the hill, or is it rolling down the hill? “Start to” is a more difficult phrase to deal with than “in order to,” because sometimes you do need it. But more likely than not, you don’t
Rather than making “start” the active verb, use the verb that’s actually more active — like walking or rolling — to tell your story.
11. Nix “that”
In about five percent of your sentences (total guess from the grammar police), “that” makes your idea easier to understand. In the other 95 percent, get rid of it! “I decided that journalism was a good career for me” reads better as “I decided journalism was a good career for me.”
12. Replace “thing” with a better word
Usually when we write “thing” or “things,” it’s because we were too lazy to think of a better word. In every day life, we may ask for “that thing over there,” but in your writing, calling anything a “thing” does not help your reader. Try to replace all “thing” or “things” with a more descriptive word.
13. Try really hard to spot instances of “very” and “really”
This is a very difficult one to remember. I almost never get it right, until I go back through my copy, and the word jumps out at me, and then I change the sentence to “This is a difficult one to remember.” Because really, how much is that “very” helping you get your point across?
It doesn’t make the task sound more difficult. Same thing with “really.” It’s not a “really” difficult tip to remember. It’s simply a difficult tip to remember. Got it?
14. Make your verbs stronger
“Make” is sometimes used in the same way as “start to,” in place of what could be a stronger verb. For example, I first titled this post, I wrote “25 ways to make your copy stronger.” When I re-read it, I realized the verb wasn’t strong. I’d used “make” as the verb, when it doesn’t tell the reader much at all. So I changed the title to “25 ways to strengthen your copy.” Eventually I realized “tighten” was an even better verb.
15. Ditch the passive voice
As this UNC handout explains, using the passive voice isn’t really wrong. But whenever you have the chances to make your writing clearer, you should — and avoiding the passive voice is one of those instances.
I know the passive voice when I see it, but I’m bad at explaining it, so I’m going to leave that to Grammar Girl. Explaining grammar is her specialty.
16. Refer to people as “who” not “that”
John is the guy who always forgets his shoes, not the guy that always forgets his shoes. It’s easy to make this mistake because that has become acceptable in everyday conversations. But it’s more noticeable when it’s written down.
17. Avoid “currently”
“Currently” is virtually always redundant. Don’t write: “Tom Jones is currently a communications director.” If Tom Jones is anything, he’s that at that moment; you don’t need “currently” to clarify. Just get rid of it.
18. Eliminate “there is” or “there are” at the beginning of sentences
This is often a symptom of lazy writing. There are lots of better, more interesting ways to start sentences. Oops. See how easy it is to make this mistake? Instead of starting a sentence with “there is,” try turning the phrase around to include a verb or start with you.
For example, replace the sentence above with “Start your sentences in a more interesting way.” If your copy includes a lot of phrases that begin with “there is” or “there are,” put some time into rewriting most of them.
19. Match up your bullet points
Bullet points are a popular and effective way to organize complex ideas. Just make sure your bullets correspond to one another.
Too often, writers mix and match mistakes with what you should do or make transition to shoulds halfway through the post — which only confuses the reader.
If your piece is called 3 Career Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make, here’s a bullet point that works:
• Forgetting to tailor your resume each time you apply for a job
Here’s one that doesn’t work (because it’s not actually a mistake — the writer inadvertedly switched to what you should do):
• Make sure you tailor your resume
Often you can turn any idea into a tip by adding a verb. For example: “Remember that sitting on your head helps you write better.” Make your bullet points consistent and your writing will read more smoothly.
20. Use contractions
Which sounds more personable: I am heading to the market that is close to my house, or I’m heading to the market that’s close to my house? Contractions make your writing sound friendlier, like you’re (not you are) a real person. And that makes it easier to connect with readers.
Contractions can also make your post easier to read and comprehend. So go out of your way to include them in your posts! Your editor will thank you.
21. Steer clear of the ing trap
“We were starting to …” or “She was skiing toward …” Whenever you see an ing in your copy, think twice about whether you need it — because you probably don’t.
Instead, get rid of were or was, then eliminate that ing and replace it with past tense: “We started to …” or “She skied toward …” Pruning excessive “ings” makes your writing clearer and easier to read.
22. Check your commas with that and which
When used as a descriptor, the word “which” takes a comma. But the word “that” doesn’t. For example: “We went to the house that collapsed yesterday” or “We went to the house, which collapsed yesterday.” Confused about when to use “that” vs. “which?” Grammar Girl offers a great explanation.
23. Replace “over” with “more than” for numbers
Over 200 people did not like your Facebook page — more than 200 people did. Of course, everyone will know what you mean if you use “over.” But using “more than” is one of those little details that will help your writing shine.
24. Hyphenate modifiers
Whenever you modify a noun with more than one word, you need a hyphen. Lots of people don’t follow this rule, so it’s a great way to show you actually walk the walk. That means you need a hyphen if you’re writing about full-time work.
But you don’t need one if you’re working full time. Got it? The exception: No need to hyphenate modifiers that end in “ly.” Those are OK on their own. So your newly hired employee doesn’t need that hyphen.
25. Identify your tells
Happy writing in the New Year ...
