Ah, editing. Nobody really likes editing their own writing. While writing can be occasionally gratifying, and the products of editing are certainly rewarding, the process of editing is at best neutral and at worst actively painful. So let’s talk about the pain!
There is a big difference between self-editing and editing done by someone else. The former is more accessible, but the latter is much more effective. This is because self-editing is really difficult! We all like writing more than editing, and it takes a lot of training and practice for us to become able turn off our attachment to our own writing in order to cut, develop, or rearrange the material. So, the recommendation is to get someone else to edit your work.
That said, self-editing is better than nothing. So let’s talk about self-editing strategies. This discussion is based on our fact sheet on the writing process, which you should peruse for more details.
Editing is daunting, so let’s break it down into three layers: structural editing, content editing, and copyediting. (There are many ways to break down editing, but this will do as a rough approximation.)
Structural editing is the most high-level part of editing. It focuses on the overall structure of the piece of writing. The questions at the forefront of your mind during a structural editing are: (1) what is the main point of this piece?, (2) is the main point salient?, (3) does the support of the main point flow naturally?, (4) are there too many digressions and tangents?
If you find yourself at a loss during a structural edit, there are two main strategies for getting unstuck. First, try a reverse outline. This works very well for some, but not for others. (Alex swears by them; Megan not so much.) Reverse outlines tend to cue our attention to the structural level, and so make structural thinking and rearranging easier. Second, you can try working backwards. Most people’s first drafts are messy because we quite naturally work out and refine our ideas as we are writing. This is great, but it means that we tend to bury the most important parts of the writing towards the end, or somewhere in the depths of our paragraphs. So sometimes going in reverse order–from conclusion to introduction–helps unstick some things.
Content editing is maybe more familiar. It is editing at the line and sentence level. Assuming that you’re clear on what you’re writing, the goal of content editing is to remove ambiguity, clear out needless verbiage, and generally punch up the flow and grabbiness of your prose.
There are many, many strategies for content editing your own writing. You can step back and talk through a paragraph to yourself (or to someone else). You can underline two or three key words in the paragraph and see if you need to reorganize anything. The bottom line of almost all of them is to introduce a little bit of chaos to how you’re moving your attention at the sentence-to-sentence level.
Copyediting is what most people associate with editing. This is the final layer of editing, the polish. This kind of editing looks for grammatical problems, typos, spelling errors, consistency of terms, and so on. Self-copyediting is the hardest because you are too familiar with the meaning of what you’ve written, and so sometimes we miss these less salient bits of the surface form of the writing. The best strategy to make your copyedit more effective is to work backwards, paragraph by paragraph. As with the content editing, the idea is to introduce some manageable distance from your own writing as you edit.
We hope these tips will help you be better self-editors. Getting the balance between editor brain and writer brain is hard, which is being an editor is a viable occupational choice.