The Ultimate Editing Guide
My Unconventional Wisdom on Writing
Disclaimer: I intentionally left this piece unedited to emphasize the point that no writing is perfect, and all work deserves editing. It isn’t a flaw in your skill, it’s part of the process. Good writing is easy, great writing requires attention. Forgive me when you stumble across an error or you think something could have been written better; it’s there to show you it’s okay.
Editing — it’s the part of writing the readers need the most but us writers hate to give them. Editing is sluggish, brutish, grueling. It takes all your time away from telling a story and invests it into fixing one you’re tired of. I know the feeling, especially when writing essays.
I’ll have a great idea and run with it, writing faster than my mind can follow, and when I finish — Ah, heaven on Earth. But I loathe the act of sitting down to fix it, partly because it bores me, and partly because it makes me insecure.
Why can’t I write well enough to not edit?
I know you’ve been there, too. We all have. But it’s mindset better left in the gutter. There’s no such thing as the Kim Jung Gi of writing. Some writers can crank out masterful pieces with eloquent prose, but not everything is perfect, even if it’s as simple as a grammatical error.
Therefore, we edit. We edit a lot.
The beautiful thing about editing is that it’s all up to you! There’s no absolute editing cut sheet; we all edit in different ways. This ultimate editing checklist — less of a checklist and more of a guide — is my method and mine alone. It may work for you, it may not. Whatever your preference, let’s get right into it.
Things to Consider Before Editing
The one trick I keep always is avoiding mass edits. I burn through heaps of paper, considering I edit everything in print, but it’s imperative that I don’t overlook anything. Like a scientific experiment, you maintain many constant (or, control) variables and only change an independent variable to monitor the dependent variable. I make a few small revisions, cut this or that, tweak it here or there, then I reprint.
Furthermore, it’s perfectly acceptable to invent your own editing language, a way to communicate with yourself that only you understand. For me, I use asterisks that mean, “Rewrite!” and a weird modified paragraph marker that I use to label which paragraph is being edited in what order. Sensical? No. Does it work for me? Yes.
Lastly, there are many edits that I don’t see necessary. I call these Discretionary Edits.
Discretionary Edits
When you search for editing advice online, you’ll often find long lists of every edit in the metaphorical book, from grammatical edits to structural. Don’t read all of them and think you need twenty-five drafts to trim your piece into some ideal manifesto.
Some edits are dependent on the type of writing. Editing everything you see can produce too formal of a piece. For me, writing essays, I lean toward the conversational side of things, skirting edits that make me sound like a stick. For instance, “Avoid saying what doesn’t happen.” Heeding this advice would likely change a line like, “She didn’t say anything,” to, “She stayed silent.” In my voice, “She stayed silent” seems like a robotic observation, when I’m looking for something I many say to a friend.
Another common piece of advice is to cut unnecessary adverbs and adjectives. Instead of, “She moved quickly,” you can say, “She rushed.” Sure. It’s more concise; more powerful. But I’m not convinced it’s inappropriate all the time. If “She moved quickly” flows better than the latter, keep it. It’s your choice.
Now, the time has come for the meat of things. With the cautionary statements out of the way, let’s start editing.
Round One: Recon
Nothing gets edited in my first draft. I read it in my head, not out loud. You’ll read aloud later. Avoid getting hung up on that at first. As I read, I look for big chunks I’ll rewrite, and I slap my fancy asterisk down on it in bold, red ink.
Round Two: Rewrite
After I’m done reading, I retrieve a legal pad or scratch paper and I rewrite the chunk beneath the asterisk traditionally. Yep — with my hands. And a pencil, imagine that. After that first pass, I type up the rewritten parts and reprint.
Round Three: Prepare for an Audience
This is where I read aloud. Still to myself, but out loud. Then I take note on that legal pad of where it gets chunky, where it turns to sludge, where my voice gets inconsistent. I fix it, then I reprint.
Round Four: Welcome to the Nitty Gritty, the Line Edits
These are the smaller edits that every listicle on Medium mentions. Regardless of how many times they’re mentioned, many of us overlook them. Don’t. Find your weaknesses and pay extra attention to those.
1. Hunt down the redundancies. Scrap the “He clapped with his hands” and the “He jumped with his feet.”
2. Start seeing the forest for the trees and eliminate cliches. They pull people out of your story and into their own, detracting from the power of your words.
3. In most cases you only need to use one dialogue tag: “said.” Our brains have been conditioned to see that and subconsciously recognize it. When you begin using tags like, “she grunted,” or others, it brings it to our conscious awareness and breaks up the pace of what we’re reading.
4. Eliminate repetitive words that you repeat when you repeat things. When we pick up on repetitive words that are being repeated, our brain recognizes the pattern and it feels off.
5. Learn the difference between words like into/in to, further/farther, who/whom, and so on. After, read your writing and fix them. Not everyone will see when you use them incorrectly, but the habit of writing well is good to build.
6. For every semicolon there must be ten commas. It’s an arbitrary rule I created, but in most cases a comma does the same job without distracting your reader. Sometimes a semicolon is your only proper option; don’t overuse them.
7. My favorite part, and easily the most challenging, is the hack and slash. Cut twenty percent of your total word count. Once again, it’s an arbitrary percentage, but it’s good practice in finding where your writing can be more concise. I usually cut sixteen to twenty five percent by the third draft just rewriting certain parts. If you get to this step and on the next revision you add more that’s okay, so long as it’s necessary.
All these edits get done over the third through sixth draft in my writing because, as I’ve stated before, I prefer to make small edits and revisit, just in case my edit needs an edit. After you’ve made it through all these steps, your piece will be ready for a small audience.
Round Five: Individual Presentation
In this step, the first time someone else experiences the piece, I read what I’ve wrote to a closely trusted advisor. The key is not to let them read it but have them listen to you read it. Humor Essayist David Sedaris reads his rough drafts at the end of his book tours and takes notes on what makes people laugh the most, where there is still some clunk, and sections that don’t engage the audience. I mimic this with my girlfriend, who has a similarly aligned sense of humor, great love for writing, and a double-edged way of critiquing. I take notes on where she laughs the most or seems unenthused, then when I’m done reading, she grills me.
With her personal feedback on paper, I revise the document and reprint for the next round.
Round Six: Listen to Others
It’s important for any artist to surround themselves with a devoted group of like-minded creatives. I have a group chat with some well trusted individuals where we all share our work and respond to the feedback of each other. Find yourself a community like this, whether with people you know or don’t know, and ensure you all understand what’s expected: be honest — the more brutality the better.
What’s Next?
This is only the first part of revising a piece. Once you hold the final draft of this cycle — which you can repeat as many times as necessary — you have one last task: wait. Lock it in a drawer, in the water reservoir of your toilet, or give it to Trump and tell him it’s his tax statements and don’t touch it for a couple weeks. I usually wait two.
You need time distance between you and your work. When it’s “done,” and you’ve invested too much, it’s personal for you. No one is above this connection we form with what we create. Leave it alone, and when the time is right, come back. Come back with a fresh perspective and go where you need from there. If it needs a complete rewrite, restart. Kill your darlings. If it’s good, edit anything that needs it then present it to the world, we deserve to see, and you owe it to yourself to let it go.
When you release it, keep an open mind. Listen to what your readers say about it and learn for the next time. Not everything is perfect the first time, nor is it the last time, but we can build upon that.
That’s the beauty of our craft.
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