“I don’t have to read any of your writing to know it’s all shit!”
This is how one of my writing professors introduced himself on the first day of class. Unfortunately, it’s as true in business writing as it is the classroom—including a lot of the content we see online.
Writing well is hard, and it’s made harder by the fact that almost anyone can recognize bad writing.
What’s the key to good writing you may ask?
Editing.
And once you’re done with that, another round of editing.
Editing is by far one of the least glamorous parts of writing. It’s my least favorite, and I used to avoid it whenever possible. I’ve had to learn the hard way how important it can be, and I’ve had to struggle to find the secrets to it.
I’m going to go through the tips and tricks I’ve learned about editing with you, and then I’ll take you through some examples of how I do it, using these rules.
7 Editing Rules to Make Your Writing Shine
You’ve just finished writing something. It could be anything: a blog post, a case study, or a landing page. Whatever you do, don’t hit publish!
Go back and read your writing again, using these 7 rules as your guide.
1. Go Small
Start by focusing on one sentence at a time. You want every one of your sentences to say exactly what you mean for it to say.
Sometimes the difference between a good sentence and a great one—or even between a good and a bad one—is one word. The only way you’ll find that one word is if you go line by line, sentence by sentence, and focus on the details.
2. Obsess Over the Right Word
Mark Twain famously said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
The right word can make all the difference, and if you can’t trust Mark Twain on writing, who can you trust?
As you read, any word that doesn’t feel right or that misses your exact meaning is worth a pause. Take time to find the right word, so your readers aren’t ever stopped by the almost right word.
3. Read What Is Actually Being Said
It’s easy to read what you meant to say instead of what’s really there. But just because it makes sense to you doesn’t mean it will be clear to your readers.
So go slow. Try to imagine different ways your sentences could be understood. Your writing will be unclear if it isn’t obvious who your pronouns refer to, if your synonyms don’t make sense, or if your punctuation isn’t accurate.
To see everything, you may need to let some time pass between your writing and your editing. If possible, let your writing sit for a few hours or even a day before you start editing.
4. Once You’ve Gone Small, Go Big
Make sure each paragraph and sentence are where they need to be and that they fit into the overall flow and structure of your piece.
You want a logical progression from beginning to end. You also want to check that every sentence and paragraph is on topic and leading you toward your conclusion.
Sometimes you’ll find that your intro is really your conclusion, or your conclusion makes for a better intro. Once you’ve rearranged everything to flow nicely, you’ll often notice that paragraphs or entire sections become unnecessary.
5. Avoid Repeating Yourself
Every sentence and word in your writing should have meaning and weight. Repeating yourself only waters down the impact of your words.
There are many times where you should say things a few different ways to get across your meaning. But if you do, make sure each way you say it presents the information in a new light. If all you do is say the exact same thing with a different word order, then it’s simply unnecessary.
Here’s an instance where knowing your audience can help. Make sure you avoid giving your readers too much or too little information.
This leads me to my next rule/tip, which, following my own rules, I debated over including. (It could be seen as repetitive.) However, I think there’s enough of a distinction that it needs to be said…
6. Less Is Usually More
As a rule, if you have the option to say something with fewer or more words, go with less. People don’t like wordy or fluffy writing. It’s boring, and it feels like the writer is wasting your time.
When you first start editing, your 1,500-word article may drop to 700 or 800 words. This isn’t a bad thing!
If you leave it shortened, it will be far more engaging than the longer version was, and if you decide to beef it up, you’ll have a stronger, higher quality piece.
Either way, both you and your readers win.
7. Lastly, the Final Proofread
The longer you spend editing, the more important the final proofread is. Every edit you make is a chance for small grammatical mistakes to sneak in. Always go through your piece one final time to catch any small grammatical issues before you publish.
If possible, the best option is to have someone else read it. They’ll be able to catch things you couldn’t, or simply let you know when a sentence makes them stop because it’s not clear. Ask them to be brutally honest with you and point out things that broke their flow and concentration.
Be aware, if you have to explain what you meant to someone, your writing simply isn’t clear enough. Experiment with different ways of saying things until you’ve made your meaning clear.
One final tip: If you don’t have someone else to read your piece, then read it yourself bottom to top. You won’t be able to check flow this way, but you will be more likely to catch little mistakes, as you’ll be looking at each sentence in isolation.
Now for the part you’ve been waiting for: putting these editing rules to work…
3 Case Studies: Taking Your Writing from OK to Outstanding
Let’s look at some excerpts from various pieces of writing that some of my blog editor friends have been sent. We’ll go through each of them using my editing guidelines and see how we can change these into something worth reading.
First on the Chopping Block: Clarity Matters
This is from an email a friend of mine received. It’s very close to making sense, and it likely made perfect sense to the author. However, what the words actually say isn’t as clear.
Here is the excerpt from the email (unedited):
I’m putting together an expert roundup post on guest post requests receive. And I naturally wanted to invite you to contribute.
The question is: What’s the strangest guest post request you’ve ever received?
First, we’ll go small: we’ll go sentence by sentence, obsess over each word, and make sure everything is saying what we want it to.
Doing this, we run into our first problem. The first sentence doesn’t make sense, especially the end.
I’m putting together an expert roundup post on guest post requests receive.
But let’s face it. The whole sentence could be written better.
So how could they have fixed this? First of all, the word “expert” likely isn’t necessary there. It just adds to too many words, muddying the sentence. We could maybe inject that idea somewhere else though, so we’ll put that to the side.
The end of the first sentence could maybe be fixed by simply adding, “you have.”
I’m putting together a roundup post on guest post requests you have received.
This is already much clearer.
Now we’ll move to the second sentence.
And I naturally wanted to invite you to contribute.
This sentence probably isn’t even necessary, but if you wanted to keep the idea you could maybe add in the “expert” we took out earlier, making it something like:
I’m wanting only experts in this roundup post, so naturally I wanted to invite you to contribute.
The last sentence isn’t too bad, but it’s still not immediately clear what the question is. You never want your audience to have to guess what you mean. You don’t want to give them the opportunity to misunderstand you. So, to make it clear who is requesting the guest post from whom, we could say:
What is the strangest request you’ve received from someone wanting to publish something on your blog?
The last thing we need to do is step back and look at the big picture. What we find is that the first and last sentence are saying almost the same thing. Except that the last sentence is the one actually asking the question we want. So, we can cut to the chase and skip the first sentence entirely. We will need to tweak the second sentence again, but that won’t be hard.
Finally, we will get something like this.
I’m writing a roundup post and I’m looking for experts, so naturally I wanted to invite you to contribute.
The question is, what is the strangest request you’ve received from someone wanting to publish something on your blog?
That’s it. It’s not glamorous. It’s not always easy. But it’s also not complicated. It just takes the time and effort to go slowly through every line. The more you do it, the faster you will get.
Second on the Chopping Block: Seeing the Big Picture
Let’s look at another example, this time an excerpt from an article that was published in a small blog about business valuation.
Another important factor to consider is that only a relatively small portion of early stage venture investments really work out in the way they were supposed to when the investment was made. The following is from a friend of mine and I thought it was brilliant so, I thought I’d share his thoughts here with you – He calls it the 1/3 rule which goes as follows:
1/3 of the deals really work out the way you thought they would and produce great gains. These gains are often in the 5-10x range. The entrepreneurs generally do very well on these deals (the VCs do even better).
Again, the first thing you should do is go small. There are maybe a few small things you could fix here or there in these paragraphs, but nothing terrible. So, we’ll move along, and this time focus on the big picture.
The first paragraph is all intro. That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if it was at the beginning of the article, but this excerpt was pulled from the middle.
Lengthy intros are like a red light. They stop the reader or cause them to start scanning. That’s a no-no: good writing keeps readers engaged. Unless an intro is necessary for clarity, it’s usually better to get right into what you’re saying.
On top of this, we see that the beginning sentence of each paragraph is very similar. We should already be thinking that these paragraphs could be combined, or at least one of them removed entirely.
A good way to see how to combine repetitive paragraphs is to ask yourself what’s included in one that isn’t in the other. If we do that here, we see that the only thing the first paragraph says uniquely is this:
The following is from a friend of mine – He calls it the 1/3 rule which goes as follows:
The rest of that first paragraph is entirely unnecessary. If we take everything else out and combine what’s left, we have something like this:
“A friend of mine has a brilliant rule that he calls the 1/3 rule. It states that only 1/3 of the deals really work out the way you thought they would …”
In my opinion, this is a tighter, clearer, and more engaging paragraph than the two it replaced. We didn’t lose any information, and we actually made it much more interesting because every sentence is new and important.
Last on the Chopping Block: Less Is More
This last example involves several snippets from an article that was pitched to a blog editor friend of mine. The ideas in the article weren’t bad, but the article was declined due to poor writing. It wasn’t worth the effort for my friend to fix it.
Don’t let this happen to you. Make sure your work has gone through several edits before it reaches anyone.
We’ll look at each snippet individually, and we’ll go a little faster through these examples.
The first excerpt we’ll look at from this article is this:
The final goal for marketing is growth and a lot of thought and effort needs to be out into planning before jumping in. Here are 5 new marketing tactics to consider in 2018 to help your brand move forward that final bit-
- Webinars and live events
It feels as though not many companies pay enough attention to webinars even though the idea is not that new. You can even use a third party to help host the event and handle the process.
Not only do these companies help host the event but they also help bring an audience. A live event or a webinar gives your brand a face and you really get to communicate directly with your audience, making your brand more friendly and relatable. This helps your customer keep your brand in mind over the ten others out there competing in the same niche.
Going small, I’m immediately stopped at the first phrase
The final goal for marketing
It’s time to obsess over words. The author doesn’t talk about any other goals for marketing before this, so it seems out of place to call this the “final goal.” Instead what the author seems to mean is something like,
The end goal of marketing
Or simply,
The goal of marketing
Less is usually more, and in this case, the extra word isn’t necessary. There are a few grammatical errors and one glaring spelling mistake just in this first sentence, but I’ll leave those for you to find. After all, you should practically be a pro at this now.
The first and second sentences are entirely disconnected. This could be fixed any number of ways, but one simple way would be to change “consider” to “grow your business.”
Here are 5 new marketing tactics to grow your business in 2018
As a bonus, we can now drop the rest of that sentence as unnecessary.
Moving on to the first little bullet point:
- Webinars and live events
It feels as though not many companies pay enough attention to webinars even though the idea is not that new. You can even use a third party to help host the event and handle the process.
Not only do these companies help host the event but they also help bring an audience. A live event or a webinar gives your brand a face and you really get to communicate directly with your audience, making your brand more friendly and relatable. This helps your customer keep your brand in mind over the ten others out there competing in the same niche.
Structurally the first sentence comes out of left field, and worse, it doesn’t explain how webinars and live events can fix your business. The information that everyone is interested in is buried down in another paragraph.
Grammatical mistakes aside—again I’ll let you guys find those—this problem could be largely fixed by swapping the first and second paragraphs and tweaking things a bit.
- Webinars and live events
A live event or a webinar gives your brand a face and allows you to communicate directly with your audience. This makes your brand more friendly and relatable and helps your customer keep your brand in mind over the ten others in the same niche competing for their attention.
It feels as though not many companies pay enough attention to webinars even though the idea is not that new. You can even use a third party to help host the event and handle the process.
With just swapping those paragraphs, and making a few small grammatical fixes, these paragraphs already look immensely better.
***
Moving further into the article we find another hotspot of trouble.
There is a lot of software out there that allows you to understand the location of your customers and the types of products that cause impulse buys for all your individual customers.
Using this information, you can pop up the exact product needed for your consumer rather than have them search around for ages. If you list a product in a way where it is a one touch buy, targeting a consumer who is already in search for something like it- chances are they will choose your product.
Getting pedantic, you don’t really “understand” a location, do you? You “know” a location. This is very nitpicky, but in editing, you must be. Fixing that one word makes the sentence clearer, and it reads smoother as well.
There is a lot of software out there that allows you to know the location of your customers and know the types of products that cause impulse buys for your individual customers.
Moving on to the second paragraph, again we see a few grammatical mistakes and some confusing language. Overall, this paragraph is unnecessarily wordy and full of fluff. Let’s see if we can cut it down.
Being pedantic again, let’s look at this phrase: You can pop up the exact product needed
It sounds unnatural. You could maybe change it to this: You can bring up the exact product needed
It’s a little more natural, but there might be a better way to fix the sentence as a whole. We’ll leave it for now. We might find a way to fix it later on. For now, let’s focus on what this paragraph is telling us. It’s talking about using customer data to target advertising to a customer. So, let’s say that.
The original:
Using this information, you can pop up the exact product needed for your consumer rather than have them search around for ages. If you list a product in a way where it is a one touch buy, targeting a consumer who is already in search for something like it- chances are they will choose your product.
The cut-down version:
Using this information, you can target consumers who are more likely to buy your product based off their location or their other searches.
This is better, but it doesn’t get in the part about it raising the chances of a consumer buying your product, and it is still a clunky sentence. So, let’s try rearranging it.
If you use this information to target consumers based off their location or their search history, they’ll be more likely to buy your product.
This is ten times clearer, and now that it’s so short, there may not be much point in having it as a separate paragraph. That will depend on your style, but now, with a few more edits, it reads,
There is a lot of software out there that allows you to know the location of your customers and the types of products they buy on impulse. If you use this information to target consumers based off their location or their search history, they’ll be more likely to buy your product.
Editing like this takes some time, but you can see the value right here.
***
Finally, I’ll leave you with a warning of a paragraph. This is what happens when you see what you meant to write, not what is on the paper, and you don’t edit enough to catch it.
Before marketing was a huge industry products were sold by word of mouth what people who had tried the product thought. Going traditional with a digital edge and letting your consumers participate via hash tags, image sharing and video sharing has proved to be Coke’s most successful campaign with the ‘Share a coke’ campaign increasing the sales of the company by 7%.
Really? This is too bad for me to even start! And it could be why this article was rejected.
So here’s your challenge: How would you rewrite this passage?
Final Words
The most important thing to remember with writing is this: there is always more to learn and always more you can improve on.
Editing (especially self-editing) takes practice, and it’s an iterative process. One pass of editing will probably never be enough.
That said, language is constantly changing and evolving, and so should your writing. The longer you work on a piece, the better it will be. But at some point, you have to publish it, because the more pieces you finish, the better you will be.
So, find the balance that works best for you. Make self-editing part of your writing process, but don’t get hung up on perfection. Publish the damn thing.
