How to Be Your Own Best Editor: An Essential Toolkit for Everyone Who Writes.

Copyright © 2019 Barry Tarshis.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-6890-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6891-1 (e)

iUniverse rev. date:  06/24/2021

Contents

Chapter 1     Get into the Right Mind Set

Chapter 2     Set Priorities

Chapter 3     Bone Up on the Fundamentals

Chapter 4     Make Sure the Words Say What You Want Them to Mean

Chapter 5     Umbrella-ize the Ideas in Your Paragraphs

Chapter 6     Let Your Readers Know What’s Coming

Chapter 7     Be Paranoid About Pronouns

Chapter 8     Put Modifiers in Their Place

Chapter 9     Zero in on Subjects and Their Verbs

Chapter 10   Get the Most Out of Verbs

Chapter 11   Make Sure Your Voice is in Good Shape

Chapter 12   Cut What You Don’t Need, but Don’t Go Overboard

Chapter 13   Use Sentence Structure to Control Emphasis

Chapter 14   Keep Your Readers in the Loop

Chapter 15   Use Signposts to Smooth Out the Reader’s Ride

Chapter 16   Create Mini-umbrellas for Complex Information

Chapter 17   Put Parallelism into Practice

Chapter 18   Know When— and How—to Combine

1

Get into the Right Mind Set

L et’s not pussyfoot. The biggest obstacle you have to overcome when you edit your own writing is you, which is to say everything you have already come to know and feel about a document that you yourself have produced and that you yourself must now scrutinize and administer to. How do you get around the fact, for example, that having written them yourself, you already know what the words are supposed to mean? And how do you neutralize whatever emotional attachments may have already taken hold between you and the sentences and paragraphs that are still moist from the blood, sweat, and tears you have poured into them?

The simple answer to both of these questions is that there are no answers—no practical answers, at any rate. For until you can figure out a way to rewire your nervous system, I don’t care how much time you’ve spent counting your breaths at a Zen monastery: Viewing your own work with absolute objectivity is a mental Everest whose summit you will never reach.

What’s the alternative? Simply this: to accept the fact that self-bias is an occupational hazard of self-editing, and to adopt a mental approach and a set of practices that will help to keep this hazard reasonably at bay. Here are five suggestions whose purpose is to give you a leg up on a problem you’ll never entirely solve.

1. Create a time barrier. It is always wise to let any document you’ve written and are about to edit sit for a spell before you start to red-pencil your way through it. An ideal sitting period would be, oh, five or six years. Otherwise, fifteen minutes will suffice—just as long as you use that fifteen minutes to clear your mind. Sort your laundry. Organize your desk. Watch Oprah. Buy the Houston Astros. Do anything that doesn’t relate to writing—and doesn’t eat into any of the mental energy you’re going to be needing later on.

2. Change the look of the document. Gay Talese, the former New York Times reporter and Esquire contributing editor who has written several best-selling nonfiction books, once told me that his way of gaining perspective on his own work is to tack manuscript pages to a wall in his office, and then to peer at each page from the other side of the room through a pair of binoculars.

Talese’s ritual may seem bizarre to you, but don’t be too quick to dismiss its utility. Neuroscientists have recently discovered that regardless of how old-sock familiar a stimulus may be, the tiniest of variations can trick your brain (momentarily, at least) into thinking that it is processing a stimulus it has never encountered before. The practical implication to self-editing: You’re more alert.

Virtually any visual change can make a difference. If you use a computer when you write and revise, for example, try to do your editing on hard copy, leaving plenty of space between the lines and in the margins so that you can make notes and record your changes. Don’t ask me why (maybe it has something to do with the angle of your head), but if you are like most people, you can focus more attentively on words and sentences that are looking up at you from a sheet of paper, as opposed to looking out at you from a computer screen.

True, if you use a computer to write, editing on hard copy means that you or your computer slave must eventually input the changes. But the trade-off here—extra time and labor for better quality writing—is not what I would call a pact with the devil. And while I’m on the subject of visual change, think about doing your hard-copy editing at a location other than your usual writing place—and for the same general reason: to prevent your brain from being lulled into a state of been-there-done-that complacency.

If you have no choice other than to edit on screen (you’re on an airplane whose business-class accoutrements do not include a laser printer), try changing the way the words actually appear on the screen. Bump up the size, or change the style of the font. Convert everything to boldface, or expand the space between the lines. If you have a color monitor, switch the color of the screen characters. I often play with color when I write or edit, using different colors to tell me how finished a particular section of the writing is. Among other things, color-coding the text helps me establish priorities: I can scroll through the document and see at a glance which sections need the most work.

3. Read the writing out loud. Listening to your writing as you read it aloud will often alert you to shortcomings that could slip by if you were reading the document silently. The trick is to read slowly and to pay attention to how the writing flows. If I find myself stumbling (or running out of breath) while I am reading one of my sentences aloud, it’s a safe bet the sentence needs work. I’ve heard of some writers who go so far as to record their writing into a tape recorder, and then, with the manuscript or computer screen in front of them, play back the recording and note which sections are still rough around the edges.

An even better option, if you can manage it (and if the importance of the document warrants it), is to recruit somebody to read your writing aloud to you. This option assumes, of course, that the document is not as lengthy as War and Peace, and that the person you recruit is disciplined enough to suppress cruel giggles. Generally speaking, though, you would be amazed at how much attention you pay to your own writing when somebody else is reading it aloud.

4. Don’t force the issue. As I will be emphasizing in the next chapter, it isn’t until you’ve had a chance read through a document from start to finish that you can get a rough fix on how many problems you will eventually need to address in your editing, or how difficult it’s going to be to solve those problems. The one thing you can pretty much bet the farm on, though, is that some problems you stumble across will take you less time and less effort to solve than others. And what you don’t want to do, if you can possibly avoid it, is to get so bogged down trying to solve one or two unusually nasty problems that you don’t have any time or energy left to address all the other problems that need to be addressed.

A good way to avoid this common editing pitfall (and to enhance your editing efficiency in the process) is to do your editing in sweeps. Here’s what I mean: Instead of trying to complete all your edits during one start-to-finish march through the document, be prepared to go through the document several times, tackling the easier-to-solve problems during the early sweeps and setting aside the more resistant problems until the later sweeps.

The tricky part about executing this strategy is deciding how much time and effort you should be spending on a problem before you decide to let it pass until the next sweep. My advice is to push but not press. In other words, do what you can reasonably do to fix the problem, but don’t keep banging your head against a wall that isn’t budging. As long as there are other solvable problems in the document that warrant your attention, keep moving ahead.

Eventually, alas, you will run out of easy problems and will have to go mano a mano with the problems you’ve been avoiding in the earlier sweeps. But what often happens to me when I follow this practice is this: Problems that might have taken me several minutes to solve during the first or second sweep (if indeed I solved them) become a lot easier to solve in subsequent sweeps, when I’m more focused on that problem.Well, sometimes. Other times I have no choice other than to slug it out with a particular problem and to settle with the best solution I can come up with.

5. Keep a sharp mental edge. Editing is tough, exacting work—the mental equivalent of pumping iron. To do it even reasonably well, you need a clear head and a deep reservoir of mental energy.

In light of these demands, it is never in your best interests to edit when you are physically or mentally fatigued, when you’re preoccupied with other priorities in your life, or when you’re pressed for time—running late, say, for your four-year-old’s first dance recital. What invariably happens in these situations is that your brain either shuts down or races ahead, and, in either case, prevents you from achieving the laser-like concentration that you need in order to get the most out of your editing efforts.

One last piece of advice: Regardless of how clear-headed or energetic you are, or how much time you can afford to spend on your editing, try to do your editing in relatively short, highly focused segments—no more than twenty or twenty-five minutes at a time—punctuated by brief breaks. And if at any time during these segments you catch your mind drifting—you’re looking at the words but you’re thinking about global warming, your upcoming dentist appointment, or the last-second touchdown that cost your favorite football team a victory the day before—put the document on ice for a couple of moments, and do whatever you have to do (stretch, take deep breaths, splash cold water on your face, or swig more coffee) to get your mind back to where it belongs. Sharp pencils are a good thing to have when you edit. A sharp mind is better.

2

Set Priorities

W ord has it that Oscar Wilde, the nineteenth-century Irish playwright and poet, was so fussy about his writing that he would sometimes ruminate for as many as five or six hours over a single comma decision. Without knowing which specific comma decisions prompted these ruminations, who’s to say whether the results justified the effor. But it’s probably a moot point. The importance of precise comma placement notwithstanding, not too many of us are in a position to emulate Wilde’s work habits. Oscar Wilde, remember, did at least some of his writing during the two years he spent in Reading Gaol, a British prison. And even when he wasn’t behind bars, he never had to factor into his comma-related ruminations the 6:00 p.m. pickup deadline of Federal Express, or snippy voice-mail messages from antsy clients, or impatient publishers.

No need to belabor the point.