•August 31, 2022•

Editing, unlike eye surgery, is not an exact science.
We all come at things with our own processes, our own perspectives.
Some of us run the spell-checker first, others tinker with ledes first, but many of us give a story a good copy edit first and only then go back to look for holes, imbalance, telegraphed quotes, issues of context, extraneous words, logical flaws, jargon, bias, lack of fairness, lack of appropriateness, poor pronoun usage, lack of continuity, unparallel construction, lack of specificity, disjointedness, embarrassing turns of a phrase, too many long sentences (such as this one) and more.
I could go on for the remainder of this column listing the things we look for that have a tendency to muck up a perfectly good story.
Once we’re done looking for the bad stuff, we focus on the good stuff in a story. No wonder people think we’re Negative Nancys.
We all have different approaches, and we all have different things that absolutely drive us nuts.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.