Writer's Tips for Self-Editing

Most people approach editing as if it were death itself. Okay, maybe it is. But by learning only a few simple rules, you can make editing, if not fun, at least a lot easier.

The most important fact about editing: it's not whether or not you spelled the word right, but rather about how you put the words together. Start by looking for the following problems in your writing.

Eliminate unnecessary words. This is difficult in the beginning, but becomes easier with practice. In school, you probably had those stupid 500-word essay assignments. And you probably had to really work to fill in that 500-word space. That taught you a bad habit - how to BS your way through writing.

If you're now trying to be a serious writer, you must eliminate the BS fluff. Start by writing shorter. Go through your text and eliminate a third of the words without eliminating any of the content. When you pay attention to what you've really said with an eye to getting rid of things, you'll find redundancies, run-on sentences, overly-described passages, and complex prepositional phrases. You don't need all those words. Kill them.

Develop an appropriate voice and tone. Your texting voice and your writing voice are two different things. You use a different tone for email to your mom from the one you use when emailing your friends.

When writing most nonfiction, you generally want to use approximately the same tone and words you'd use to write your mother, your employer, or your teacher. For certain "edgy" or specialized writings (comedy, for instance), you can use a less-formal approach, but for the most part, keep it anal.

Know your grammar and spelling. No one else will do it for you! I can't begin to tell you how many beginning writers, even today, expect editors to actually edit their stuff. That's not what they do. If you can't put a subject and verb together in the same sentence, they won't do it for you unless you pay them. You have to understand the basics before you will get any respect.

(I'm going to get thunked for this, but: you need to use proper grammar and spelling everywhere. If you're posting to a forum frequented by other writers and you actually want their respect and attention, you must sound like you know what you're talking about. You have to understand the basics. When you don't - well, have you ever bought a car on a lot? Did you know what you were talking about? The salespeople know within minutes how much you really know about a car, and their attitude - respectful or not - will follow from that initial impression. Works the same way in any writing forum. If you want to get other writers' respect, use their tools properly.)

Write like you speak. No joke. And I don't mean the pidgin or street-ese or non-King's-English you use with your brahs. I mean the diction and phrasing you use when something excites you, when you know about a topic and you're trying to teach someone else. This is the kind of speech where you do use proper English (accented or not), where you are being authoritative, where you sound like you know what you're doing. Don't write in dialect; the last person able to do that properly was Mark Twain. Instead, just use the words you'd use if you were explaining the topic in your article to your friend.

Write authoritatively, not wishy-washy. If you sound like you doubt yourself, others will doubt you as well. Eliminate language like "I think" "I believe" "probably" as much as you can. Make direct statements. Use commands in instructional text, and bold statements in other text. Let people know you know what you're saying.

Learn about stylebooks and stylesheets. This is not what you learned in school for proper citation. Stylebooks and stylesheets go far beyond that. They are, instead, a coherent set of rules for how you must write to be consistent: do you use American or British spelling, for instance? Do you spell out numbers ten and under, or do you write them as Arabic numerals? Serial commas - do you put one in after the next-to-last item or not?

These are rules that change depending on who you're writing for. It's annoying. But it's a problem you must deal with. If you don't have a stylesheet for your publisher or paper, develop coherent rules for yourself, and always follow them.

Editing Tricks

Few people start out good at editing; it takes time and practice to develop an editorial eye. But there are three techniques I've found useful over time.

Read onscreen and printed out. Text looks different on the printed page than it does on your computer screen. If this is not cost effective for you, at least change the font to something very different and read through it.

Read your text backward. You can do this word by word, or line by line. Try it to see how many errors you catch.

Read your text out loud - slowly. This technique forces you to focus on each word. If you change a word while you're reading, by the way, the word you used out loud is the correct choice almost every time.