Do You Edit Enough?

Writing is easy. Anyone can do it. As a seven year old i used to fill full A4 pages with writing, just as i could write copious amounts of text nowadays. It doesn’t take that much skill at all. Editing does!

I’m a compulsive editor of my work. Ill proof read and change sentence structure, paragraphs and even the content many times before i publish an article. In fact i read my text at least ten times before posting it. Then ill read my article once its posted a further ten times to make sure the text is as it should be. Your text needs to flow grammatically and structurally to make the reading easy. It also ensures the authors views are properly communicated to the reader. Every time i read my work i always find ways of improving my text, mostly through little punctuation and grammar corrections. I could think the world of my writing one day, come back to it a week later, and still find multiple flaws.

When i write an article i ensure it reflects my message successfully. As writers its our responsibility to ensure the quality and clarity of our work is upheld. If its not, we lose readership. Its vital to proof read the crap out of your text! Its vital to ensure that when we proof read our writing, the sentence structure flows easily, and the reading process seems effortless. Ensure your work isn’t swamped with overly long sentences, if so allow for commas. Each time you use a comma in your text, you allow the reader to have a breather, recompose and continue reading. If your text is composed of huge sentences without proper punctuation, people will give up reading. I believe the proper editing process needs to run over at least three days, preferably a week. This is because one needs to look at their text objectively and completely from a readers perspective. Ask yourself, would you read your article if it was another authors? Ensure that your work is edited to a point were reading your own text becomes a pleasure itself. If your happy with your work only then you could expect others to see it in a positive light.

Generally i spend 3/4 of the writing process on the editing. I want my text to be written in a way that allows the reader to form interest and read my text with ease. I’m no great writer by no stretch of imagination but I’ve learnt to be my greatest critic, and that drives me to be better at what i do. We all grow as people as time goes by, through editing our literary skills will also grow and evolve. To finish this off ill give you one last piece of advice, a little something i learnt as a primary school student when i was 12 years old. Quality beats quantity all the time when it comes to writing! Editing allows an ordinary and potentially flawed piece of literature to truly reach its potential. Good editing is vital in your pursuit of quality. So write away but pay extra attention to this vital step in your writing process. Without proper editing your writing will be lost in the ocean of literary mediocrity. Edit! Edit! Edit!