Weekend
Writers
Guild

Editing Tips

So, you finally have a hodge-podge of written material that probably does not make sense and has all the sins of omission and commission known to the English language. Congratulations! You have just ventured into the fun and exciting world of writing!  Depending on how big your ego is, the next couple of steps are probably the most fulfilling and fun-filled of them all.

The Art Of Connecting With Your Readers

Everyone has a unique style of doing things. In school, we had to plod through a series of renowned literary pieces from various periods in history. Admit it, most of this stuff we found boring and dropped the book after the first few chapters. And we found it boring not because they were poorly written (they were classics, weren’t they?), but because we were interested in dating and football and other extracurricular activities. People who surf through the web are most probably just like us, and our unique writing styles should cater to their tastes.

The first rule in editing is really a question to oneself.  Is what I am expressing in written form something that my reader would understand and hopefully, appreciate?

Regardless of your writing style, the primary objective is trying to fit in your reader’s shoes and make your written material easy reading for a wide spectrum of your intended audience. Back to the rude cashier storyline. Who is your intended audience in a piece like this? Naturally, you would want to appeal to a broad base of cash-wielding, value-discerning consumers. Blue-blooded literary critics are probably less than 0.0001% of this audience. A huge majority would want to know about the basics- who, what, when, why, how. With this in mind, you would use a simple chronology of events and a simple conclusion in simple everyday language (of course with some emotion!).

Making Sense

With the intended readership in mind, the next obvious step is sorting through your hodge-podge of ideas on paper and deciding which bit of information adds sense to your case. You may cite a general statement first (for example, back to the rude cashier storyline, “A single act of unkindness costs businesses money) then go to specifics later or do the reverse (One day at the grocery, while I was checking out…and so on). The information presented in between must lead towards supporting your message.

KISS

Keep your sentences short and simple. The easiest way I would lose my readers is making long, winding, compound sentences, the nouns in which are just riddled with the most flowering but useless adjectives that do not add any new information to my message and most certainly accentuate the level of disinterest which my readers are now becoming increasing sensitive about. See, did that do it for you?

Spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence constriction and other technical details

I use Microsoft Word for my word processing needs, as do more than 50% of the rest of us. All word processing programs I am familiar with have some form of spelling, grammar and thesaurus tools that you could use to become fairly competent writers. I have always been told (and correctly so) by my peers that the correctness of these computer based tools are not to be exclusively relied on. In the next chapter, feel, free to check out the links I suggest you visit to check out editing tools.  

Third Party Intervention

I always make it a point to get a second unbiased opinion about anything I publish. Big companies have editors and proofreaders to do this chore, but I prefer to have a friend do this for me. I think it builds a relationship with this person and it accomplishes the objective very well.

Sleep on it

Ever want to end out an email you know if going to be controversial? What do you normally do? Yeah, you’re right. You sleep on it. Same thing here. You take a good night’s rest, then read through the material one more time before sending it out. If you feel good this one, time, you will feel good. Period.

Well, we’ve gone through stuff you have to know before making your grand entrance as a web-based writer.

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