Free and Easy Editing Tips: Improve Your Content Now
Welcome again to the Quilltowers blog! In the previous post, we shared exquisite book ideas to gift your lover who is a writer. You can check out the post if you are in the mood for a late Valentine’s day gift.
Today we are willing to share free tips on one of the most important steps to writing anything – an academic write up, ghostwritten work, features, articles or books. That step is editing. Editing is the process of carefully scrutinizing a written work to restructure, re-write or re-organise it in a way that will make it better overall. Editing is done to eliminate previously unnoticed errors, for consistency and for accuracy.
To achieve the best result, it is often advised that an editor should be different from a writer. As a writer, you should have an impartial editor who will not hesitate to pick apart the errors in your works. How do you choose a good editor?
Qualities of a Good Editor
Being an editor requires important qualities such as;
- Attention to details: As a writer, your chosen Editor must be able to pay attention to details. They must be able to see the errors that you made unconsciously. This often requires reading the work until they are satisfied that it is the best version of what you intend to write. Features such as the tone, mood, simplicity, the target audience and your grammar should be evaluated with careful attention to details.
- Strong communication skills: Your Editor must have a good communication skill. Artists tend to have a fragile ego and writers are not an exception to that rule. A good Editor needs to know how to correct your mistakes without alienating you or the others in the team. If you work in a team, the Editor may manage other members of the team apart from you. This makes communication important in order to ensure that the other team members work together like one well oiled machine.
- Organisation: Your Editor needs to be a well organised individual. The organisation of your work depends on them. They should know which page, chapter, paragraph or idea should come first in order to tell a complete story. Without a good organisation skill, it is possible that your work becomes disjointed and incoherent.
- Tone and Style Maintenance: Your Editor needs to be familiar with your style and the tone of your works. This is important so that they can ensure that you stick to the set tone despite temptations to stray from that part. This is the same if there is a particular tone or style that the brand you write for wants to adhere.
- Fact Checking and Research: If your write-up is non-fictional, your Editor needs to be someone who has experience with fact checks and proper research. Someone who accepts everything you write to be true without properly checking is not fit to be your Editor. Fact checking is half the work of an Editor of a news agency, which tells a lot about the importance of fact checks.
These aforementioned qualities are trained into good Editors with education and experience. For good Editors, they become second nature. These are the Editors you want to hire.
Free and Easy Editing Tips For You
In order to improve your writing, here are simple editing tips for you before you send your work to a professional Editor;
- Loud Reading: Reading aloud makes it easier for you to spot errors that you initially ignored. It helps you to catch unclear sentences, grammatical errors and inconsistent tones.
- Structure Evaluation: Review the supposed structure of your work and the structure of the finished work. This will allow you to catch any inconsistency in the form, style and structure. You should remove unnecessary words or fluffs, avoid ambiguity and use active voice instead of passive voice in your writings.
- Fact Verification: Find reliable sources to back up the claims you make in the work. It is advisable to have more than three sources to back each facts up. These sources should hold strong in case others dispute your position on the subject.
- Tools: In order to improve the quality of your editing, you can use tools such as Grammarly, Evernote, Hemingway, Ginger Software amongst others. However, do not rely too much on these tools.
Editing is a work fit only for patient people. Remember to be patient as you check and recheck your writings before turning them in. A good Editor is always worth the money you spend on them. It is infinitely better than ruining your art because of a missed mistake.
For further information and guidance, you can always contact us. For you, we are always here.
