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It's a dirty job, but everybody's got to do it
by Natalie Canavor and Claire Meirowitz
One of the most difficult things a writer can do is to edit his or her own work. It's great to have someone else, preferably a trained editor, review what you’ve written. But you may not always have that luxury, and even if you do, you should never be satisfied with a first draft.
Whether you're developing a newsletter article, marketing piece, ad copy or a letter, you need to finish the job by reviewing, reshaping, revising and refining. We don't want to depress you, but three revisions should not be unusual. The good news is that developing your self-edit skills will work backward to improve your writing, so you'll save time at the front end.
So how do you start? Here are some basics.
Give It a Rest
The first—and probably the most important—suggestion is to let some time pass before you review what you’ve written. After a few days, the material seems new, and you can look at it as if someone else had written it. This tends to make factual or grammatical errors jump out at you. Another reason for delay is that our subconscious needs time to process what we’ve done. After a hiatus, it often dredges up new—perhaps improved—ideas, connections and phrasings.
Look at the Big Picture
Read your work all the way through without stopping for details of grammar, punctuation, construction and phrasing. Ask yourself: Does this piece actually say what I want it to say? Of course, this assumes that you have first written a one-sentence summation, putting down on screen or paper what you want your reader’s take-away message to be. If you haven’t done that, you won’t know whether your finished article does the job, and you won't have really thought the story through.
Read It Aloud
When you verbalize the words, subtleties of tone, phrasing and meaning usually become painfully clear. So do awkward constructions that you should rework and repetitions that need to be eliminated. Listen for the rhythm, flow, length and variety of sentences. If there are too many short sentences, it will sound choppy to the ear. If you’re using long, convoluted sentences, you’ll realize that the reader won’t be able to follow them. If it sounds monotonous, chances are you’ll put the reader to sleep.
Transitions, Leads and More
When revising, what merits careful attention? Transitions, for one thing. Ask yourself: Does this piece flow smoothly from one sentence to the next? From one paragraph to the next? Can the reader follow a trail from beginning to end? If you’re writing in classic journalistic pyramid format in, for example, a newsletter or Web article, can the reader grasp the basic picture early on? If you’re writing a feature article, does your lead grab the reader and make him or her want to read on? Does the nut paragraph give the meat of the article succinctly? If you’re writing a marketing or sales brochure, have you led the reader from A to B to C? (“C” should always be your “call to action.”)
Tone
Read your work and consider the tone. Purpose and audience should govern your choice. Are you writing for readers who are knowledgeable about the topic? Are you writing materials that must persuade readers to take action, such as buying a product or taking political action? Are you writing to inform? Your tone—casual, folksy, formal, serious, light, pushy, aggressive, inspirational—is what connects you to the readers, leaves them out of the loop, or maybe even turns them off.
Quick trick: When writing to a specific person, visualize your intended audience, literally. See his or her face and gestures and body language, hear the person's voice. Do this before you write and you'll magically take exactly the right tone for the message. If you're writing to a group, try visualizing a few "sample" faces.
Sentence Structure
Our fifth-grade teachers marked us down for sentence fragments. But we grownups realize that fragments can be used as stylistic tools. Other elements of sentence structure, such as clauses, pronouns, adverbial and adjectival phrases, and compound sentences serve to add variety to our writing. We just need to revise with an eye toward straightening out convoluted phrases, shortening overlong sentences and correcting not-quite-right meanings.
Right for the Medium?
Each communication vehicle has an optimal format and style; check that your piece works for it. For example, if you’re writing for the Web, be sure to consider sentence and paragraph length—the shorter the better. People often won’t read long blocks of copy on the screen. If you’re writing for an academic audience, you should generally cite your full sources as footnotes.
Recently, one of us was asked to help a friend draft an invitation to an important event. It took a while to translate some complex political realities into the right words and tone. Only after the job was finished did the friend think to mention that the piece would run in a newsletter—not, as had been mistakenly assumed, mailed in invitation form. Result: revision time.
Even with all these items, we’ve only scratched the surface of what you should consider when editing your work. We haven’t talked about word choice, use of quotes, fact-checking, grammatical consistency and more. All that’s grist for another mill, in a future column.
Meanwhile, here's one more recommendation:
Get a Feedback Buddy
Make a deal with a colleague willing to drop everything to eagle-eye your drafts and make suggestions on both the macro and micro levels. One of us, in running a communication department, realized that virtually everything she wrote—memos, letters, proposals, reports—had the potential to climb all the way up to the CEO and board and also had potential political ramifications. Not to mention that communication department work had to be model-quality with no room for error. The department had approval rights over everyone else's important writing, and that made some “critics” eager to identify mistakes.
So routinely, she had her chief assistant review everything from memos on up and vice-versa. As the department grew, the buddy-system rule applied to everyone.
Beyond endless catches in spelling and grammar, comments like these typically emerged:
"Your hostility to the recipient is showing."
"You buried the event's date."
"What does the 3rd graf mean?"
"Why not get to the point?"
What would your buddy find in your work? It's best to find out before your documents journey off your desk and into the world beyond.
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