General
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Say what you want to say, in a way that your audience will understand. Look at yourself and ask “what should I say?“. Look at the reader and ask “how should I say it?“.
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Manage your editor. When you ask “Can you take a look at this?”, your helpful friend or colleague will provide the edits that are most obvious to them. These tend to be sentence-level or word-level edits for tone, flow, clarity, punctuation, grammar, or word choice. If this is what the project needs most, then that’s great. If not, then your friend might be putting painstaking attention into sentences that are destined for deletion. Save them from this by telling them “here is how you can be most useful to me…” or “this is what I need from you…“. Specify the kind of edits that you want.
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Control salience: Graphic designers have a concept called the Visual Hierachy. When people see a poster, they generally ingest its content from left to right, top to bottom, reading large text first and then fine print. The Visual Hierarchy points at relationships between placement of information (location, size) and how much the reader picks up on the information. The word salience is sometimes used to describe how much something grabs your attention. Unlike graphic designers, writers don’t have as much freedom to play with font sizes or the location of images. But writers do have their own tools to control salience. Some tools:
- Qualifiers and relational words
- Relative position of phrases in a sentence
- Relative position of sentences within a paragraph
- Repetition
- Brevity
- Tone
Levels of editing
A writing project goes through a life cycle. It starts as an insight, or an idea, or a message. At this point, like a baby, it needs nourishment, forgiveness, and unconditional attention. As the writing project matures, it will require more and more discipline and direction. The levels of editing reflect these different goals.
Developmental editing: Assess the project for its merits and weaknesses, flesh out underdevleped ideas. Help the writer get the majority of the project on paper. Mostly occurs at a holistic level.
Sounds like:
- “Have you thought of this?"
- "What if you included a section about this?”
Structural editing: Evaluate the structure of the writing project. Evaluate the order in which ideas are presented. Suggest moving, adding, or deleting sections. Mostly occurs at the section, chapter, or paragraph levels.
Sounds like:
- “I think this would make more sense after Section 3, since at that point the reader is familiar with X."
- "This section is really well-written but I’m not sure if it’s serving the document goals. Do you need to include it?”
Line editing: Edit sentences or groups of sentence for content and flow. “What should I say?” has been mostly answered. Line editing emphasizes “How should I say it?”
Copyediting & Proofreading: Even more fine-grained than line editing.
Writing Mindset
Writers need to spend time on two kinds of activities:
- Expressing themselves
- Refining and critiquing
For most people, these two goals are in conflict. It’s hard to say what you really think or feel when you’re worried about how it will sound.
For most writers I know, the solution is to cycle between the two modes. Spend some time in an uninhibited state, exploring different ways of expressing things. Then spend some time in a critical state, taking a hard look at what you wrote to identify what works and what doesn’t.
More advice on writing:
Good Writing by Marc H. Raibert January 1985