Things To Look Out For When Editing Your Writing
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I’ve been an editor, on and off, for about a decade now. I was an editor for a small indie book publisher in the US for a couple of years. On and off I also gave suggestions on beta reads or when friends asked me to edit their works. In the last couple of years, I’ve offered my editing services to the writers of Vocal (before I discovered Medium, by the way). For the last 14 months, I’ve also been a Script Editor (and sometimes writer for the mental health and psychology YouTube channel Psych2Go. Oh, and I also run my own publications here on Medium and I’m an Editor for Found In My Journal. Here I do light editing as required (correcting typos and punctuation, not changing the actual text).
Through my years of looking at peoples’ writing with a critical eye, I’ve come to realize there are 3 main issues that crop up again and again. So, I thought I’d share my insights with you.
1. Unnecessary wordiness
This is a bugbear of mine. When I’m line editing, I end up scrapping a lot of words in my line edits with Track Changes due to unnecessary wordiness. Or I throw in the odd comment as I go along, of ‘unnecessary’…
