Nearly all writers agree that editing is an important stage of the writing process and needs considerable time and attention. Writers spend a lot of their time enhancing their drafts, often multiple times, to ensure the clarity and flow of ideas, revise sentence-level errors, correct typos or other minimal mistakes, and improve overall qualities of their writing. While correcting language errors can be important in the reviewing process, they are not everything about the perfecting your writing.

Often there are various approaches and viewpoints about polishing your drafts. Below, we discuss some of the most important strategies about editing.

Outline

1. Editing as Refinement
2. Editing as Art
3. Editing for Reader Connection
4. Editing as Collaboration
5. Conclusion
6. Edit Your Drafts Now

Editing as Refinement

The common approach to editing is refinement, where the initial draft is considered a raw canvas that needs polishing. Writers not only correct grammar, punctuation, spelling, and other mechanical errors, but also look deeply into the text to improve the flow of ideas, increase coherency, avoid unnecessary jargon, enhance tone and clarity, diversify sentence length and rhythm, and implement feedback to enhance the overall quality of writing. Writers in this approach endeavor to produce an effective, error-free, and clear text with improved overall writing quality. Refinement is very close to what student writers do daily when they draft, edit, and polish their writing before submissions.

Editing as Art

Some writers believe that editing is not just correcting mechanical errors—to them, it is a craft much like a craftsman does to a piece of art to achieve a desired outcome that is not only aesthetic but also impactful in many respects. Therefore, editing extends beyond correcting grammar and syntax errors as classic authors often manipulated grammar rules to achieve artistic objectives.

Editing as an art approach mainly involves the use of literary and rhetorical devices that make writing more appealing and pleasing to readers, often with greater impact and depth that evoke strong emotions, and persuade them to call for action. Today, contemporary writers utlize literary and rhetorical devices equally to communicate ideas and achieve objectives effectively.

Editing for Reader Connection

Similar to editing as a craft method, this approach views syntactic errors as surface-level errors and asserts that only error-free writing is not enough.

Writers must consider readers’ preferences, expectations, concerns, and needs for effective results. That is why writers adapt tone and language choices to persuade them. Often readers are likely to be persuaded and engaged if they find a piece of text relevant and engaging if it directly answers their tastes, needs, and concerns. Therefore, editing can be viewed as a tool to empathize with readers and to make a piece of text relatable to readers’ experiences.

Editing as Collaboration

Editing is also a close cooperation between writers and editors who offer useful insight and often different perspectives. In this case, writers value external inputs and feedback and incorporate constructive criticism to improve the overall quality of their writing. The downside of this proofreading method is that over-editing sometimes results in erasing the tone and voice of authors and makes a piece of text less authentic or enjoyable to readers.

Conclusion

Considering what we discussed above, it becomes clear that editing your writing is an important activity that requires careful planning and consideration. Editing can have numerous advantages; it allows writers to articulate their ideas clearly, improves readers’ engagement, makes a piece memorable, avoids unnecessary confusion, and adds artistic and aesthetic qualities to a piece of writing. For better results, often these approaches do not stand alone—rather writers should be selective and combine elements from a variety of editing methods to improve their writing quality.

The Writing Center assist student writers to edit and improve their writing quality. Please get in touch with writing tutors to receive necessary guidance or assistance.

You can find other opproaches to editing in the work of Patrick Good with Words: Writing and Editing.