Editing

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Permalink Reply by Emily Doolin Aulicino on July 18, 2009 at 1:16am

Read your paper aloud or have a friend read it. If you or the friend stumbles on any words or sentences, consider revising these portions.

Make sure you have sentences of varying lengths and types. Each paragraph should be a mixture of the three types of sentences (simple, compound and complex). Even paragraphs should vary in length form short to long.

Be certain NOT to start most of your sentences with a subject, followed by a verb. BORING! Use the phrases in your sentences in different locations.

Eample:
Barry raced like lightning down the hill to get home before the rain yesterday.

Improved:
Yesterday, Bary raced like lightning down the hill to get home before the rain.
Like lightning Barry raced down the hill to get home before the rain yesterday.
To get home before yesterday's rain, Barry raced like lightning down the hill.

In doing this you must try all the possibilities to decide which sounds the best to you.

Permalink Reply by Karen Rhodes on August 18, 2009 at 11:27am

Pamela Dean, author of Tam Lin and The Dubious Hills and more, talks about the different hats a writer wears. There's the Author Hat, of course, and the Business(wo)man Hat and the Accountant Hat and the Publicist Hat, and there is the Editor Hat.

When you put on your Editor Hat, it is as Emily says: You are looking for tightening up the writing, cutting out the fat, and checking the logic of the piece to be sure the pieces all hang together. Invariably, the order of things in my books get rearranged by my editor (at McFarland and Company), but that's nothing more than a matter of perspective. So we all should be open to thinking of more than one way we might approach the structure of the piece.

For one thing, when you put on that Editor Hat, look for repetition and redundancy. I have a tendency in my early drafts to say something two or three times. Usually, that's not necessary, and a lot can come out. When I turned in my manuscript for my first book (Booking Hawaii Five-0: An Episode Guide and Critical History of the 1968-1980 Television Detective Series (McFarland, 1997)), the editor told me I had to reduce it by half! They wanted 500 pages, and my ms. was 1000. I had a field day -- and a great learning experience -- cutting out a lot of fat. Unfortunately, a goodly chunk of meat had to go, too, but by the time I got down to cutting the meaty part, I had learned a whale of a lot about cutting out fat. (And it paid off, big time: a reviewer called my prose "crisp and elegant!")

For another, as Emily indicated, be sure the thing hangs together by rearranging sentences and paragraphs, if necessary. If it isn't logical in its progression, your readers are going to get hopelessly lost. You are their guide; be sure the map you are giving them in your prose will not have them ending up in a dense jungle or a swamp.

Also, consider if there are items of information that didn't fit in the body of the book, whether or not you want to add that information in an appendix or appendices. As for the index, I am in favor of the most detailed index I can come up with (and so is McFarland). A good detailed index is a vital part of a book. Part of the way to evaluate a good (non-fiction) book is the completeness of the index.

Let me recommend a book which is a good "how-to" for editing: Getting the Words Right: How to Revise, Edit, and Rewrite, by Theodore A. Rees Cheney (Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books, 1983). It's a writing course -- or I guess I should say an editing course -- between two covers.