Edit Your Own Writing: 6 Steps To Turn Your First Draft Into Gold🥇

A systematic and professional method of editing

PHOTO BY IKOWH BABAYEV FROM Pexels

3 years ago, I got my first taste of serious writing. It was an essay I had to write to get shortlisted for this elite leadership course.

I wasn’t very good at writing. But after watching a few videos on the subject, one thing was clear to me: writing is nothing without editing.

The essay that I wrote for the “leadership course” was crappy. But after editing it over 10 times, it became good enough to get me selected.

If done properly, editing can turn any draft into a masterpiece. I’ve covered the most effective editing method in this article. If you want to make your writing shine, read on.

Content:

· How the Editorial Process Works
· Developmental Editing
· Line Editing, AKA Stylistic Editing
· Copy Editing
· Proofreading
· Conclusion

How the Editorial Process Works and Why Every Self-Editor Needs to Know About It

Suppose you write an article or a book and submit it to a publication. After reading your work, the publication will decide if it’s worth publishing. If it is, then they’ll take it through a series of upgrades before publishing it. And this series of upgrades is called the Editorial Process.

It’s carried out to provide the readers with the highest quality literature manageable.

The editorial process usually takes place in 4 stages:

1. A developmental edit: This is the part of editing where the developmental editor reads the complete manuscript and gives the author feedback about the structure; the flow of chapters, sections, logic, and organization of the work.
2. Line edit: This is the part where a line editor edits the manuscript line by line; making sure that the writing is clear, concise, and has a pleasant rhythm.
3. Copyedit: This is the part of editing where spelling, grammar, facts, style, and many other aspects are thoroughly examined to make sure the manuscript is flawless.
4. Proofreading: This is the final edit before publishing. It’s done to make sure that no error is left unedited.

Each of the 4 stages of the editorial process is complex and lengthy. But you don’t need to follow the entire process by the book. Working your way through the steps I’ve written in this article is enough.

So, let’s start editing.

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Developmental Editing

This is the most consequential part of editing.

PIE CHART OF THE IMPORTANCE OF EACH EDITORIAL STEP. MADE BY AUTHOR WITH IMAGEFLIP; Image created behind a digital wall; © the author assumes responsibility for the provenance and copyright.

It’s the most consequential part of editing because you’ll be editing the:

• Structure
• Order of paragraphs
• Arguments
• Delete and rewrite big chunks of texts
• And edit the structural flow of your article

Developmental editing starts before you write your first draft. It starts during your outlining phase. Check out: 7-Step Outlining Formula to Write Better Blog Posts That Rank Higher🐱‍🏍

Side note: You should know that your draft will look completely different after you’ve done your developmental editing. So, it’s a good idea to keep a backup of your old draft.

You can do your developmental editing by going through the following 4 steps:

Organize Your Article

After you’re done with your first draft, make an outline based on how it turned out. Outlining your first draft helps you access the logical flow of your article without reading it line-by-line.

Now, cut all the parts of your article that don’t align with your reader’s wants or needs. Cut everything that your article isn’t supposed to shelter. (I happen to cut an entire section from this article. Can you guess what it is?)

Afterwards, you should be adding bullet points and number lists everywhere appropriate because they’re easy to degust.

Familiar to Unfamiliar Writing

Clarify the Arguments, Explanations & Content of Your Article

After you’ve organized your article, start fine-tuning your arguments.

Arguments are a method of persuading people through claims, reasons, evidence, warrants, and oftentimes, through acknowledgements and responses. And because their main purpose is to persuade people/readers, how arguments are structured depends on the readers you’re trying to persuade. More on arguments: Argument: The Basics | Department of Communication | University of Pittsburgh

Example of an argument:

Claim: Editing while writing wastes time.

Reason: Task switching takes energy.

Evidence: Dr. David Rock, in his book Our Brain at Work, states that switching between cognitively demanding tasks takes a lot of energy.

This was a rather simple example of an argument. Most blogs contain dozens, if not hundreds of small arguments like this. And most academic journals, on the other hand, tackle 1 argument over dozens of pages.

As a blog writer, it’s enough to provide one piece of evidence for merely helpful arguments and two for crucial arguments (suggests Cal Newport, in his book, How to Be a Straight-A Student). Additionally, evidence can come in the form of quotes, stats, or research studies.

With all that, you should be able to edit your blog’s arguments wholly.

Subsequently, look at all the concepts you’re explaining in your article. See if they need further clarification. And add enough images and infographics to illustrate your points.

Optimize Headings and Subheadings

The last step of your developmental edit is fixing your headings and subheadings.

Headings and subheadings are the GPS of your blog post. People navigate through your blog post and know beforehand what a section contains by reading headings and subheadings.

So, to help your readers know, at a glance, what to expect in each part of your article; write your headings and subheadings clearly. (This also helps with SEO because your H2 and H3 tags matter a lot if you want to rank.)

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If you’ve done your developmental editing properly, 80% of your editing is done. Next comes line editing, which will polish your drafts for a smoother reading experience and a bit of aesthetics.

Line Editing, AKA Stylistic Editing

This is the phase where you make your writing stand out, sound soothing, and feel elegant.

This is where you unleash your inner Shakespeare or Hemingway.

The purpose of line editing is to:

• Make your writing clear and descriptive
• Make your writing easy to read and understand
• Make your sentences and paragraphs flow

And you can do all that by scrutinizing individual words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.

Editing Individual Words

First of all, eliminate vague words. They are words that don’t have a specific definition. And they have multiple meanings assigned to them; making them boring and ambiguous.

Vague: I ate fruit for breakfast

Vivid: I ate an apple for breakfast

Vague: Your writing is bad

Vivid: Your writing has grammar issues

Check out this Vague Words Table, find vague words in your writing, and start chopping them.

After that, you should start hunting for adverbs and adjectives.

Adverbs are words that modify other adverbs or verbs. And Adjectives are words that usually modify nouns and often end in -ly.

Though adverbs and adjectives are necessary, you don’t need them in every line. When you’re hunting for vague words, you’ll find that most of them are adverbs or adjectives.

You can type (Ctrl + f) to find any word that you think is vague, dull or you’re just overusing them.

Editing Phrases, Sentences, and Paragraphs

1. Avoid Clichés

I read this advice in at least 20 places. I don’t agree with this norm. Though this is a great practice when it comes to writing fiction, it isn’t so great when it comes to non-fiction.

Us nonfiction writers deal with facts and figures to persuade our readers. It’s our job to make every piece we write clear and fathomable. It’s our job to remove as much friction from our writing as possible. And clichés help us do that because they’re easy to comprehend.

2. Unnatural Phrasing

Repeating subjects and verbs make your writing sound unnatural and redundant.

Here’s an example: “I was outside with my friend Karen. Karen showed me her traffic cone. I was like, “Yeah, that’s a nice traffic cone. Where can I get a traffic cone?” And Karen said that there were traffic cones next to the police station and that I should just go and take a traffic cone, just like she took a traffic cone the day before.” — Clark and Miller

So much redundancy. You shouldn’t repeat subjects and verbs like that. Check out the underlined parts of the paragraph above to see what you can write instead.

You can always use pronouns to replace the repeating nouns and use auxiliary verbs to replace verbs or verb phrases.

Doing this will make your writing less repetitive and more concise.

3. Passive Voice

This video illustrates what passive voice is, and why you should rarely write in passive voice.

An excellent tool for catching passive voice in your writing is Hemingway Editor.

4. Tonal Shifts

Tone refers to an author’s use of words and writing style to convey her attitude towards a topic. — Pen and the Pad

Tone can convey a writer's trepidation, excitement, contempt, relief, or any other attitude towards something or someone.

In fiction writing, the tone is the viewpoint of the narrator or characters.

But for non-fiction writers like us, our tone is entirely ours. No character will take the blame for how you come across.

So, be careful. You don’t want to sound like a know-it-all, bossy, or someone who lacks conviction.

If you’re writing to build an audience, you can sound well-informed as well as humble; occasionally writing about the gaps in your knowledge and sharing your experience.

But if you’re writing a technical or formal piece, you can just robotically present everything, cutting out your subjectivity. (Or at least, that’s what everyone suggests).

And be careful with connotations: “an idea or feeling which a word invokes for a person in addition to its literal or primary meaning.” — Oxford Dictionary.

Connotative words can mean different things to different types of people. Even if you’re sure that you’re using a harmless word, to some people it might turn out to be extremely rude.

Check out this list — Connotative-Words

(Before we go to the next section, keep in mind that tone refers to how you sound in each part of your writing. Mood, on the other hand, refers to the overall feel of your writing. Depending on the mood, your writing will fall into a particular genre.)

5. Sentence and Paragraph Length

While doing Line Editing, you should pay close attention to your sentence and paragraph length.

Longer sentences are strenuous for us. An alleged study by the American Press Institute shows that

• People understood 100% of the written piece when the average sentence length was less than 8 words
• People understood 90% even when the average sentence length was 14 words
• But at 43 words, comprehension dropped below 10%.

So, it’s wise to write short sentences. How short?

Martin Cutts, in Oxford Guide to Plain English, suggests writing 15–20 words on average.

But don’t write all of your sentences about the same length. Consider this by Gary Provost:

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”

6. Run-On Sentences

A run-on sentence occurs when two independent clauses run together without proper punctuation or appropriate conjunctions. — Northern Illinois University

Semicolons help you edit your run-on sentences:

7. Misplaced Modifiers

Editing for Flow

“Flow is a word used to describe writing that has logical structure and varied language within and between sentences and paragraphs.” — Grammar Flip

When you’re editing for flow, you’ll be aiming to remove as much friction from your writing as possible. Your writing should move from one word to another with ease and grace.

There are two types of flow. One is the flow of your overall article; the one we fixed during our developmental editing phase.

The other type of flow is the flow of sentences and words. We’re focusing on this type of flow during our line editing phase.

Here are the 2 most important tricks to improve the flow of your sentences:

1. Adding Transitions

Here’s a list of transition words — Transitional Words | Touro University

And there’s also a great feature for adding transitions in the ProWritingAid Software.

2. Varied Sentence Length

Just like we discussed earlier. Short sentences are great. But varied sentence length is better.

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Copy Editing

This is the part of editing where you’ll be picking up flaws in grammar, spelling, punctuation, syntax, style, facts, and a few other things.

(Traditional copyeditors can’t edit line by line. They just point out mistakes.)

Now, let’s look at a few ways you can copy-edit your draft.

Mechanical Editing

You’ll be focusing on the mechanics of your writing, such as grammar, punctuation, spelling, and a few other things in this phase.

Grammar

The first thing you need to do in this phase is fix grammar. You don’t need to memorize all the grammar rules to do this, though. Grammarly and ProWritingAid (free versions) are enough to fix 99% of your grammar mistakes.

Syntax & Diction

The structure of sentences is referred to as syntax. If I change the word order of any sentence, the meaning automatically changes. Example:

• I only type now (meaning: I’m doing nothing but typing right now)
• Only I type now (meaning: I’m the only one on earth typing right now)
• I type only now (meaning: I only type the word “now.”)

Diction, on the other hand, is the word choice.

• I ride a car
• I drive a car

Which of the sentences above is correct? The second one, right?

Syntax and diction are fairly advanced grammar topics with many rules. But you don’t need to memorize all of them either.

Most of us can easily tell if a sentence sounds wrong. Reading out loud helps us catch the “wrong” use of syntax and diction with ease.

Fix Punctuation

• Hyphenation

• Coma

• Semicolon

Grammarly and ProWritingAid should take care of most of the punctuation mistakes. So, you don’t need to stress over those. But if you’ve watched these videos, you should be able to make more sophisticated sentences using those punctuation marks.

Treatment of Quotations

Treatment of Numbers and Numerals

Uses of Italics and Bold Type Phase

Bold, Italics, and Underlines: How To Use Them Effectively?

Uses of Abbreviations and Acronyms

Abbreviation: Definition and Examples

Consistency in Spelling

Do you write in British English or American English?

Or maybe, like most of us, you write in both. That’s not a pretty thing to do. It makes your article look unprofessional and inconsistent.

Don’t write favorite in one place and favourite in the other. Don’t write an email in one place and an e-mail in another.

Add your preferred writing style in Grammarly and it’ll pick out all of your spelling inconsistencies.

Typecoding

In addition to mechanical editing, copyeditors also edit parts of writing that aren’t the actual content, such as:

• Title
• Subtitle
• Headings
• Subheadings
• Captions
• Image credits
• Page/chapter numbers
• Equation
• Lists & tables
• Footnotes, headers, and endnotes

Furthermore, write your title, subtitle, headings, and subheadings in the title case. It’s the standard in most industries. Also, it’s a great contrast for differentiating the headings and subheadings from the body of your writing.

You can easily change the case with the Change Case web extension.

Facts

This is the part of the copyediting where we’ll be dealing with facts. Here’s a checklist for editing them:

Proper Nouns

Are all the proper nouns in your article spelled correctly and capitalized? You can check this by making a list of repeated proper nouns and then typing (ctrl+f). You can then find each proper noun in your article and edit them individually.

I made a lot of mistakes with proper nouns like google, medium, and Neal Patal. But that keyboard shortcut saved my butt.

ProWritingAid also helps detect misspelled proper nouns almost perfectly. But only if you paste your article on their app.

Citation

There are dozens of ways of citing your resources.

Books usually cite sources at the end of each chapter or the end part of the book. And on scientific papers; every fact, theory, or concept ends with the author's last name followed by the date of the publication. Example: (Tonmoy, 2022).

Citations also have many formats like the APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and Vancouver.

But you don’t need to worry about that because blog writers can simply add a link to the source. But don’t take this lightly. We frequently forget to cite our sources. I, for example, was pointed out by an editor that my article didn’t cite its sources in 22 different places.

Citation is a very important part of your writing. If you don’t cite quotes or images or any other material, you could get into legal trouble. So, I suggest you have a separate revision phase for citing all the sources:

• Quotes
• Images
• Facts

Fact-Checking

Most often, the info we collect from random websites, or even reputable ones, isn’t correct.

What I’ve seen with Medium publications are that they’ll accept anything as long as it links to something. I understand why this is the case. Digging for the truth is time-consuming. And so, most bloggers just cite other bloggers.

If you want to build credibility, cite primary sources. Primary sources are first-person accounts of something.

If you’re quoting Einstein, for example, don’t cite a blog you found that quote on. Find the interview where Einstein said that. Or the book where he wrote it.

This is time-consuming. But a quick shortcut is typing the phrase on Google and adding double quotation marks around it.

By doing so, Google will show you all the articles and books that contain that exact phrase. You can then judge by yourself which sources are legit and which are not.

Linking

After citing all your sources, make sure none of those links are broken. And be extra careful with the links in your table of contents, because people will click on them first.

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Proofreading

This is the last part of the editing process. You’ll go through your writing one last time before submitting it or publishing it.

There are no specific aspects of writing for you to edit in this part. You’ll be looking to kill the few remaining flaws you have in your article in this phase.

1–2 revisions should be enough for proofreading.

Here are some best practices:

• Proofreading is a crucial editing step because it screens all the remaining flaws in your article. And so, doing it when you have enough energy and are alert is great practice.
• Read slowly so that you miss no flaws. (Reading slowly and carefully is so important that some professional proofreaders are trained to read in syllables.)
• Changing the font and text size of the document you’re writing is advisable. Doing so helps you gain a fresh perspective on your article, making sure you don’t skim over anything.
• Grammar checkers don’t catch all flaws. So, keeping another tip in mind won’t hurt: Read your writing backward.
• You can also print out your document for your final proofreading because we’re more efficient at reading in print than reading on screen.

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Lastly,

You can make your editing process simpler or more complex, depending on how good you want your writing to be.

But I suggest you do at least 1 revision for each of your 4 editing stages. And try not to do 20.

Best Tricks and tools from this article:

• Grammarly
• ProWritingAid
• Hemingway Editor
• Change Case Extension
• Power Theseus
• Read Aloud
• Type (ctrl+f) to find specific words or phrases
• Clichefinder — For finding bad word/phrase usage in writing
• Search exact phrases on Google using double quotation marks
• List of transition words Transitional Words | Touro University
• List of Connotative words Connotative-Words

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you want me to cover any other topic related to this.