Tips to Help You Walk the Tightrope of Self-Editing
Self-editing can be a tricky business. Too little editing, and you may end up with a draft that has careless mistakes in it—and that can be distracting for readers. It can also mess with your credibility. Small errors in a manuscript might just lead to an overall loss of trust, which is no good.
On the other hand, it is possible to self-edit too much. Writers, you know who you are! A tweak here, a slight change there, a quick internet search for the correct use of a semicolon over there...and suddenly, a century has passed, and your story still isn’t quite ready.
As both a writer and a professional editor, I have had to learn the art of the balanced self-edit. Having the tools of the editing trade at my fingertips has definitely helped, and so I am sharing some of the tips and tricks that I have adapted and developed in order to walk that self-editing tightrope. It is my hope that these suggestions will help you to confidently send your writing out into the world, knowing that it is polished up and ready to fulfill its destiny!
1. Read your work out loud.
Honestly, this is my number one tip. As Ursula K. Le Guin says in Steering the Craft, “An awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer.” Reading your work out loud is a valuable thing to practice in the editing stage, and it will do two things for you:
First of all, it will give you a better sense of the rhythm and flow of your language. If there is anything clunky or clumsy, reading it out loud will trip you up. If you’ve repeated a word too many times, or too close together, it will sound odd to your ears. If you have a lot of one-syllable words strung together unintentionally, or a run-on sentence as long as your leg, you might start to feel a wee bit breathless.
Secondly, typos and errors in punctuation are much more likely to jump out at you, because you will naturally be relying on punctuation cues and error-free words and sequences in order to be able to narrate the words seamlessly. You are more likely to notice a missing comma or an accidental repeated word when you are reading your draft out loud.
So don’t be shy! Read it out loud; sing it from the rooftops.
2. Create a personal style sheet.
Style sheets are used by editors to ensure accuracy in a publication. They outline the basic rules to follow so that the work is consistent throughout, and contain categories like Spellings, Punctuation, Numbers, etc. With a little tweaking, you can take this premise and adapt it to make your own personal style sheet, which you can refer to time and time again.
As you continue writing, editing, and receiving feedback, you can start to build your personal style sheet in order to make note of anything that you particularly want to remember. If there are certain spellings that you know you always have to look up, add them to a Spellings list on your style sheet that you can reference. If you tend to switch tenses as you write, your style sheet might say “check that tense is consistent throughout.” If you always confuse compliment and complement, throw them on there, along with their definitions. You can categorize things in whatever ways make sense to you.
Over time, you will have a personalized style sheet that you can turn to when you are honing your draft.
3. Channel your inner Vulcan (yes, I just made a Star Trek reference).
It’s all about logic. Even in creative writing, having a narrative flow that makes sense to your reader is important. Of course, there are exceptions (after all, Naked Lunch is a cult classic), but even if you want to throw logic out the window, you should understand how it works and why you are throwing it out the window.
One simple way to look at the logical flow of your writing is by considering its transitions. How does one paragraph progress into the next? Can we follow along smoothly, or do we have to do work to connect them? Did Spock just take over the ship?! But I thought he was down on the planet!
Transition words and phrases are some of the most valuable for an editor or writer to have in their toolbox. Examples include: because, therefore, beyond, besides, meanwhile, soon, since. These are just a handful—transition words and phrases abound. They aren’t always needed, but sometimes they are just the ticket to making those connections that allow the reader to sail unimpeded down your river of words.
4. Know when to edit.
This one may go without saying, but I’m saying it anyway. First drafts are meant to be messy, glorious, imperfect, unruly, and full of comma splices. Write your heart out, and worry about the editing after.
