We’ve been thinking about attention, writing, and editing for quite a while now, either explicitly, or implicitly in a few places. Understandably, we’ve been pretty writing-focused. Today we’re going to focus on editing because this is where we’ve optimized our attention.
Understanding how attention works—and how it doesn’t—is the difference between good and bad editing. It’s also the difference between sustainable and exhausting editing. Much of what we’ll say applies to writing, but the writing process has its own motivational quirks on top of attention’s inherent quirks. We’ll get to that in future posts.
Attention is Complex
Psychology and cognitive science tells us a few very useful things about attention. First, it’s a limited resource. In attention research, there’s been a decades-long trend of finding new limitations. For example, our tracking abilities are actually quite limited, and our capacity for inattention is more extensive than previously thought. Second, the research shows that attention is a complex, layered structure. Simplistic metaphors of “shining a light” don’t capture its dynamics. If you need a metaphor, attention is more like musical performance, dancing, or martial arts than shooting an arrow at a target or driving from point A to point B. These metaphors imply that training attention is a combination of hard work, aptitude, and a bit of good luck.
This is the state of the art as it stands in research. If we want to write better, we need to take this research under advisement, but also not feel constrained by it. It turns out that attention is a complex habit that responds to how we make narrative sense of our lives.
Attention needs to be responsive to potentially any nuances of a situation. As with so many things, it’s not under full conscious control. So we have to think about attention a complex sedimentation of habits. These habits relate to how we shift between transparency and opacity, forest and trees, and figure and ground in any given situation, as we covered here. Attention is one of the most mercurial (slippery) things in our inner lives. It comes and goes like the wind, as every writer can attest. The moments of excellent performance arrive as if by accident most of the time.
Attention Responds to Nudges
It’s been imperative for us to get good at managing our attention. We’ve learned—from our experience, reflection, and the scientific literature—that attention is pretty chaotic, but that it responds to patient, persistent nudging.
That’s the bad news. The mercurial nature of attention means that nudges typically don’t work the first, third, or even tenth time. The good news is that with patient persistence (which can be very difficult), attention will eventually settle into the proper shape for the task, and once settled can sustain this shape for quite a while. This is, as we’ve already discussed, the starting point for deep work, flow, and all the best fruits of cognitive labour.
There’s an art to nudging attention. The nudge can’t be too forceful, otherwise it will backfire. Likewise, the nudge can’t be too lax, since attention will just keep whatever shape it already had. Training a puppy to sit still is an excellent analogy: you shouldn’t punish the puppy for failing to sit still, nor can you let the puppy do whatever it wants. You nudge the puppy’s behaviour with small rewards.
Practical Nudges for Editing
So, what’s the equivalent of a dog treat for our attention? Here are some nudges that we’ve found helpful.
There are some general things you should do to make sure you have basic energy to edit. First, divide writing and editing time into different blocks if possible. Attention takes slightly different shapes in writing and editing, and we should respect the differences. In general, you can do editing after the writing block. Second, the more sleep cycles you can work into an editing project, the better you’ll do. It’s far, far better to do two half-hour blocks on different days than one hour-long block.
There are also more subtle nudges within a block. First, if you’re copyediting, go through your paragraphs in reverse order. Avoiding the usual flow of the writing is a nudge from transparency (attending to what the words say) to opacity (attending to the words as markings on a page/screen). You will catch more errors this way. Second, for different types of editing you should approach the page/screen at different distances. The closer you are to the text, the easier it is to shift from transparency to opacity. Moving towards the text also shifts your focus from the proverbial forest to the proverbial trees.
If you’re doing structural or developmental editing, make the text smaller. If you’re doing copyediting or proofreading, make it bigger. For example, we sometimes do 150% zoom in Word for copyediting, 175% for dealing with more fiddly details such as references or punctuation, and 100% for dealing with paragraphs or developmental suggestions. Spatial cues like these are excellent nudges. Find what works for you!