Writing Tip

Editing Your Own Writing

Difficulty Level: Intermediate

Recommendation: Take Precautions When Editing Your Own Writing

Editing your own writing requires a particular skill. It is a difficulty for both the newbie and the seasoned professional. Here are some tips to improve the chances of a successful self-editing effort.

Wait

When you write, you link the words and phrases on the page to their meanings in your head. These bonds are strong. When you edit your words—say, after a few days after you have written them—you recall the intended meaning of a phrase. So even if there is an error, you may not detect it because of this “involuntary recall.” (Strangely, your intimacy with your own words often breeds an unwarranted confidence in the success of your document, which may result in premature publication.) The distance between you and your document is called “psychic distance.” To maximize your success when editing your own work, you must maximize this psychic distance. Therefore, wait as long as you can to re-address your work. Give yourself time to “forget” the intended meanings of your phrases.

Seek Objectivity

In informal correspondence, you may express opinions and speculations as if they are facts without the fear of reprehension. However, before releasing your document to a formal review process, you should strip things that smack of opinion peddling. Your claims should be supported by evidence that you produce or assumptions that your readers share. Otherwise, opinions and speculations should be presented as such.

Spend More Time at the End

You have written reports and papers, so this observation about the process should not startle you. Especially for a long report, we tend to put more work into the front because we read and re-read as we write, so we might end up reading the first chapter a dozen times, whereas the last chapter gets short shrift. Before sending your document out for review, spend some extra time on the latter sections.

Remember the Red

Enlisting a professional editor can be a sobering experience. Sometimes the red ink can damage egos, but it can also inform the author about recurrent errors, such as repeatedly misusing semicolons. Commit these predictable errors to memory, and look for them when you edit your own writing.

Go to Paper

Editing your work on the computer is no doubt convenient, but you may have better results when you edit on paper, especially during that “last pass.” I have only anecdotal support for what I’m about to say, but here goes: The imperfect representations of letters and punctuation marks on your computer screen interfere with your reading. The difference between the two types of representation (screen and print) are obvious. First, print is a subtractive color model (the light strikes it, and some of that light is reflected to your eyes), whereas the screen is an additive color model (it generates the light that strikes your eyes; it is a source of light). We learn how to read using a subtractive model, and therefore we do our best reading in print. Second, print is typically high-resolution, whereas the screen is lower (compare 300 dots per inch versus 72). For these and other reasons, I tend to capture more mistakes (typos and other errors) when I edit on paper. Try to do your self-editing on paper.

Drown Your Darlings

When your prose is getting long, “drown your darlings” (also called “killing your babies,” but given our times, I’ll use the least offensive term here). This term is used as a pointer in fiction writing, but it applies to technical documents as well. When you write something clever and hang on to it even when it should be cut (because of length constraints or because it just doesn’t contribute to your message), the clever prose is called a “darling.” Does it depart from your point? Drown it. Metaphors are obvious targets, especially when they are elaborate. Typically, you know these elements (you feel them, love them). In fact, you work with them as hard as you can to make them fit. You rearrange other elements in a desperate effort to improve a darling and make it relevant, whether it is a single word or a verbose phrase. Be brave.

Disenthrall Yourself

Like many authors, I tend to fall in love with certain words that I know my audience may not know (“pedantry” is one of them). In my informal writing, I tend not to take the time to repair this problem (such as in these tips, when I write something like “disenthrall”), but you should make an extra effort to substitute these words to prevent alienating your readers.