How to Take the “Ouch!” Out of Editing

Throughout the years, I published quite a few books and had the opportunity to work with professional editors. I submitted my manuscripts with slight trepidation hoping they didn’t red-line my work and, worse, call me a hack! If they viciously cut out whole sections of my manuscript, I wouldn’t meet their expectations for 300 pages or earn my advance.

I was so relieved to find out that working with professional editors is a pleasure! They understand you cannot change someone’s style. McGraw-Hill hired me to write Accounting Demystified because I make complex ideas easy to comprehend and my style is conversational and light. They did NOT hire my UT accounting professor to write it. Otherwise, it would need a new title: Accounting Made Really, Really Hard!

The professional editors pointed out unclear things and when sentences were awkward. However, they didn’t rewrite my sentences and allowed me to correct them in my own voice. They also didn’t bother to tell me about punctuation errors… they just fixed them. I have always had a stubborn mental block about whether an apostrophe belong in “its” or not. They didn’t rub any of that in my face. Instead, they just fixed it and I thought that was very kind.

More importantly, they caught me at the front end and gave me feedback early on so I didn’t waste my time. They sent me three examples of other authors’ detailed outlines and asked me to create something similar before I started writing. So, before I invested another moment on the project, they asked me to cut two chapters and add another. It was very meaningful and timely feedback.

Here are two big tips for editing:

1. Put off writing full sentences for as long as you can.
2. Relax your control freak nature and don’t concern yourself with another writer’s style.

Put off writing full sentences for as long as you can

Once you write a full sentence, you become married to it. You spent valuable time and effort choosing each word and arranging them intelligently. Woe be it to the jerk who puts a red pen to your masterpiece!

In my role as editor at an audit office, I often found whole paragraphs would disappear after I understood the big picture of the piece. Talk about PAIN. Whole families of sentences would get wiped out!

Eventually, I figured out if I asked the team to submit an outline of their report or finding to me before they wrote full sentences, we minimized the pain considerably. No one cares much if you move a segment of a sentence, replace it with something else or eliminate it completely. There isn’t that much attachment to the outline, plus the staff is still flexible at this point.

To reiterate, get agreement at the outline stage from staff, supervisors, managers, directors and the client before writing full sentences. Try it, you’ll like it!

Relax, you control freak you!

Who died and made you Stephen King? Who says your style of writing is better than anyone else’s? Ego, ego, ego!

Here is where I got my come-uppance: A virtual governmental accounting genius in our office wrote a 30-page report and I needed to edit it before it went to our directors. He was a PhD in something incredibly boring and now works for the GASB. You get the picture?

I opened up his report and was immediately repulsed by his academic-sounding prose. I felt like I was reading a very, very dry accounting textbook. “Argh!” I told a colleague, “This will demand quite a bit of rewrite!” See how snotty I was?

Then I circled back and followed my own rules for editing. The first step is to check if he had a logically constructed argument for each of his conclusions.

I created a mini-outline of his argument by using a highlighter and making notes in the margin and found his argument was P-E-R-F-E-C-T. He was a genius and all the rumors were proved true!

After that, I didn’t touch it much. I admit to putting my two cents in and changed a few of his more hoity-toity words to something less academic. It was a very short editing process for me and virtually painless for him. Looking back, I should have just left those two-cent words alone, too.

What would have happened if I decided to change his style to mine? I’d probably still be working on that project AND he would have hated me forever. We would have battled like Rock’em Sock’em Robots!

So, in stronger, more direct terms: IF A SENTENCE IS FINE THE WAY IT IS, LEAVE IT THE HECK ALONE! Hey, you control freaks out there, did you hear that? I say it with only love, your best interests and hopes for world peace in my heart.

Here’s to taking the ouch out of editing… finally! Visit my blog page to see more writing and editing tips.