A Fast Way to Edit Writing

Power editing is a fast and effective way of editing which many writers find very useful. it is possibly one of the quickest way of editing that I know of, and is surprisingly simple to master.

So, why power edit? Can’t I just trawl through my manuscript re-writing every paragraph until I’ve edited myself into a black hole? Of course, but that would be highly un-productive and you may find yourself stressing over areas that don’t need stressing over at all.

Apart from power editing being a fast and productive method to edit a piece of writing, it allows you the tighten and refine your work without getting you stuck in the rut of unproductive editing. Remember that no piece of writing whether you are a novice, or whether you are a best-selling author, is perfect. You will find that you can re-write a paragraph many time over and STILL think it’s a load of old rubbish. But that is far from reality. As long as the paragraph reads well and as long as you’ve written it as you would ideally speak then that’s fine. It’s a case of knowing when to stop. After all, if all the best-selling authors in the world stressed over editing their books would never see print!

This is the beauty of power editing as you will see. There are only two steps and they go like this:

1. Go through your manuscript, article or whatever giving each paragraph a number from 1-10. 1 being utterly poor and 10 being excellent. Remember this is your opinion so don’t be too hard on yourself.
2. Now, once you have spent some time numbering your paragraphs you need to start from the beginning again and now the fun comes in. All paragraphs numbered 7-10 leave as they are. They don’t need to be tampered with as they read fine and contain no grammatical errors etc. All paragraphs number 4-6 slightly revise. it may not read quite right or you may wish to chop and change a few bit etc. Lastly, all paragraphs numbered 1-3 need completely re-writing. They are not worth spending time on so just re-write them. Once you have written them give them a number again and go from there.

So, that’s power editing in a nutshell. I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say it’ll save you bags of time when you get to the editing phase. It’s quick and efficient. I hope you benefit from this article and please fire your questions at me, if you have any!