SELF-EDITING YOUR WRITING



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Over the last year I’ve had the honor of leading a small writer’s group, and the experience has been more of a blessing than I ever anticipated! About seven of us gather once a month on a Saturday morning to share our work, and to share our lives.

Serendipitously, we are all close in age and have undergone similar life experiences, and I am sure that is part of why our fellowship has been so strong.

Since most of the participants are new at writing, I have tried to stress the importance of self-editing—the process of going over and over our own work—rewording, remolding, reshaping until it’s the best it can be. For some the process is tedious. I know when we finally manage to get something down on the page, we are eager to be through with it. But that’s akin to a sculpture slapping a slab of clay on a slate and stopping with a basic shape. Self-editing is fine tuning that gives precision to our work. If we want our work to be readable, pleasing and publishable, we must take the time to revise it.

Here are a few of the basic self-editing tips we've been discussing. They may sound simple but they have the power to transform your writing!

• Vary sentence structures. Combine simple, complex, compound and complex-compound sentences throughout your paragraphs.

• Vary sentence lengths. Some sentences may run three or four lines; other sentences may be only two words. And there is everything in between. Mix it up.

• Where possible use the active voice instead of the passive voice.

• Write in the positive verses the negative. Instead of saying Mary does not like apples, say Mary detests apples.

• Cut out extra words. We all have a tendency to stretch out what we want to say with needless verbiage. Instead of saying, “There were ten trees lining the road,” say, “Ten trees lined the road.”

• Keep your tenses consistent.

• Use strong nouns and verbs and limit the number of adjectives and adverbs (more on this in later posts).