Five stages to great editing
Charlotte Booth • 11 January 2023
The key to great writing is in the edit
Well done on finishing your latest piece of written work - whether that is a blog, a report or a manuscript for your latest book.
Now it's time for the hard work. The editing.
Editing a piece of writing is more than just looking for spelling mistakes, typos and spurious grammar. It is also looking for flow, for sense, for formatting as well as typos. It's a pretty full-on part of the writing process, but one of the most important.
Although there are potentially many more stages to a decent and rigorous edit I have broken it down into five key steps.
Stage 1
- Reading for sense
With this first readthrough of the work, you should be looking for meaning, flow and general sense. Are the ideas between chapters or paragraphs disjointed or do they flow well? Are the ideas and arguments easy to follow? Does the writing match the objective for the piece of work?
Stage 2
- Checking for repetition
It's surprising how much we tend to repeat ourselves when we are writing. This could be repeated ideas, repeated phrases, or even repeated words in the same sentence.
By reading through the whole piece you can identify how much repetition there is and whether it is justified. It is easier to spot if that is what you are specifically reading for.
Stage 3
- Read for consistency
This is a big one, as there are so many things that we can be inconsistent about which should be the same, especially in a long piece of writing.
Writing fiction? Make sure names don't change halfway through the book. I was proofreading a fiction manuscript once where the main character’s name changed halfway through which was confusing enough but add to that she was from three different places too (Hawaii, Australia and Boston), as a reader my mind was blown.
Even with non-fiction consistency in spellings of names (personal and place names) can sometimes be a problem, as can dates. When I was writing about ancient Egypt, the dates vary from report to report with older documents being less accurate. This could result in king's reigns, for example, having discrepancies of as much as 30 years. As a writer I had to decide which official timeline I would reference and stick to it.
Stage 4
- Read for conventions
There is some cross-over here between stage 3 and reading for consistency as there are a number of conventions in writing which you need to be consistent with. For example dates can be written April 2, 1982, 2nd April 1982, or even 2nd of April 1982. Numbers can be written out in words or numerals (one or 1), but also sometimes words are used for one to ten, and numerals for 11+. And what about speech marks ?-Should you be using double and single speech marks and what for?
Once you have chosen a convention then it is important to ensure it is consistent throughout the work.
Stage 5
- Nearly done
Stage 5 is to read the whole text/manuscript one last time and make any final changes. At this stage there shouldn't be many changes left to make.
This stage is best done at least a month after you have finished stages 1-4 so that you are reading with a completely fresh eye or to get a third party editor to do this final stage for you.
In order to get all of these stages in between finishing the writing and the actual deadline you need to plan editing into your schedule. Whether you are publishing something yourself or sending it to a third party the editing is a vital step and one that shouldn't be scrimped on.
If you would like help with editing of your blogs, articles or books please drop me an email
and we can arrange a chat.
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