Editing is as much a skill as writing. It’s one authors have to master – and it’s also a specialty of its own. Done properly, editing can require at least as much time as it takes to draft the original piece. There are three main types:
1. Revision editing
This is, I think, what authors usually mean by ‘editing’. It involves re-thinking the draft text – pondering it, adjusting words, and deciding how to re-cast if necessary.
2. Proof editing
Somebody other than the author reads the finished MS for sense, meaning, consistencies, grammatical accuracy, and offers corrections. It’s demanding; the proof-editor has to be skilled enough at writing to offer fixes in sympathy with the author’s own style. Some publishers also put the book out for fact-checking, a separate process again, at this stage.
3. Line editing
This is the final step before publication. The work is carefully read, ideally by somebody who has never seen it before, for ‘literals’ – literal typographical mistakes, missed full stops, bad spaces and so forth. Usually this is done twice. The ideal process involves two people; one reads aloud, the other cross-checks what they hear against the proof.
How much time do you usually allocate for editing? Do you break it down into a system? How do you tackle this one?
Copyright © 2013 Matthew Wright
Hi Mike, You can say that again that editing is almost as much work as writing the whole MS! I have been editing and editing and am on my fourth read of my MS. I also have two readers who will give me feedback in case I missed something. You can never read it enough I find since I keep wanting to add or change something each time. Once I complete it I am sure I will feel as if I accomplished something. Then I will get on to another MS that needs editing.
I think I am learning a lot as I go. There is always room for improvement though.
Thank you for all your helpful advice on your blog. You are a wealth of experience and information to this novice.
Janice Spina
Sent from my iPad
I have absolutely no plan or time allowance for editing. I write a first draft, then I put it aside … and then the next few months / years are a blur of re-reading, re-writing, revising, etc. And a lot of the time it’s not a full-manuscript revision, just a few chapters here or there. So I’m about as disorganized an editor as you can get.
I think that editing actually takes more time than writing. It does in my case, anyway. Also, Thank you for showcasing how important editing is. In the age of status updates and tweets in 140 characters or less, people are forgetting how important it can be to re-read what you are putting out there.
[...] getting rid of absolutely all unnecessary words and phrases that don’t carry their weight. “Sixty Second Writing Tips: The Three Sorts of Editing” – Article by M. J. Wright. Editing is as much a skill as writing. It’s one authors have to [...]