Editing is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be tedious. This post walks you through how to edit your content without losing your mind.
Editing is the hardest and most time-consuming part of writing. When you hear the word “editing,” you might first think of copywriting, when you’re looking for typos, misspelled words, misused punctuation, and other granular fixes. But, editing entails much more than the tiny details.
Editing is the entire process of shaping a draft into its final form. It involves looking at the entire work, then at each chapter or section, page, paragraph, sentence, and word. You’re looking at how things are working on a deeper level than spelling. (But spelling is definitely part of it!)
So, let’s talk about how to edit your content without losing your mind. It’s time-consuming and there’s a lot to remember, but there are a few ways you can go about it that will save you time and sanity.
In this post, you’ll learn how to:
- Craft the big-picture story and message from your draft
- Solve the puzzle of getting your content to flow from beginning to end
- Make each paragraph and sentence serve your story and speak to your message
- Choose powerful words that say more with less
- Tackle the granular fixes
Start Big with Story and Message
The first place to start when you’re editing is with the big-picture edits: making sure that your story and message are defined, and that your content takes your audience there in the best way possible.
FYI… I’m summing this up as “story and message” because this will change depending on the content you’re making. For example, a blog post’s message is usually an outcome or learning goal, whereas a video or podcast episode might share a lesson through a personal story or case study.
Why do we start here?
The big stuff drives your entire piece of content. When you skip to fixing up your sentences and going word by word, that hard work could be erased in a second if you realize that you need to restructure or cut a significant amount of what you’ve written. Or, you might not fix what you know is wrong because you invested so much time into getting the wording right, which doesn’t serve your audience well.
No matter how experienced you are, the first draft needs a high-level edit. It’s important to tease out the main point of your piece and make sure that it’s clear and concise.
You absolutely need to have the big pieces in place before you narrow your focus down. If you don’t, you’re at risk of wasting hours of time and effort.
Solve the Puzzle for Flow
After you’ve designed the big picture, you have to align what you’ve written with the path you’ve created.
Your first draft should contain all of your thoughts and ideas about the subject you’re writing about. Now you’re taking those bits of information and connecting them like a puzzle so that your content guides your audience through everything they need to learn and do to get them to the end. It involves a lot of rearranging across pages, paragraphs, and sentences.
Take a round through your content looking only for ways to clear your path from beginning to end. Tell your story or message in the best way possible for your audience.
Keep Only What Serves Your Work
Editing is as much about choosing what to keep as it is about shaping what’s already there. Each sentence and paragraph needs to serve the story and speak to the message. Everything else goes.
Some people love this part of the editing process because it can feel instantly gratifying to remove all the crap around what you mean to say. But many struggle with it because they don’t like erasing their work. It’s hard to get rid of good ideas or good writing that just doesn’t fit.
(Pro tip: If you struggle with cutting your work, I recommend saving some of your favorite sentences or paragraphs in a separate document so they’re available to be reused in a piece that suits them. I call mine the “Empower Writing Graveyard.”)
Read through your content to ensure that every sentence serves your goals. Whatever doesn’t serve your message or story gets cut.
Choose Impactful Words
At this point, your piece should be coming together. This is where you can start to narrow down the focus—you’ve solved the big problems and gotten everything where it should go, and you’ve cut what doesn’t matter, so this round of edits is about shaping what’s left.
Word choice is an important part of editing because it adds weight and interest to your piece. The right wording can evoke emotion or accurately portray how you feel. Powerful words let you can say more with less.
Take a look at this section’s heading, for example.
Choose Impactful Words
The word “impactful” is a conscious choice. I could have left it at “Use Strong Words” or “Pay Attention to Word Choice,” but I wanted to convey the power and impact behind the choice. So in three words, I’m able to convey that you should choose words wisely because the choice can have a strong impact on your writing.
The danger in this step, of course, is that it can be tempting to go overboard. You don’t want to sit with a thesaurus and replace every other word with something fancy. Word choice is intentional for your work, not a decoration or a way to sound smarter.
I recommend highlighting some of the more “blah” areas in your piece as you read through it, then think of some other ways to phrase them. Think deeply about how you want your audience to feel and if there are better ways to show them what you mean.
(Pro tip: There are lists of “power words” all over the Internet, so I recommend taking a look at those to jog some inspiration.)
Impactful language helps you convey your ideas more accurately and write more concisely. Say more with less.
Tackle the Granular Fixes
Finally, the last round of editing should be the small details like misspellings, misused words and phrases, misused punctuation, and other small typos. It helps to read your piece aloud so your brain doesn’t gloss over your errors. I also recommend a spell-check tool like Grammarly or whatever is built-in for your word processing app.
This round can feel tedious because you’re so close to the end, and hunting for errors isn’t always the most engaging work. But it makes a huge difference to your image. When you leave glaring typos and misuse simple words and phrases, your work (and by extension, you) looks sloppy. Even if your ideas are brilliant, your audience has to take you seriously to see your brilliance.
Run a spell-check tool and take one last read before you hit Publish. It only takes a couple misused hypens and a there-their-they’re fiasco to turn people away from what you have to say.
Good Writing is Good Editing
Editing is time-consuming, but it’s where you can take all your great ideas and shape them into something consumable. Try to look at editing as an opportunity to dive deeper into your content and craft the experience you want to provide to your audience.
These are the main steps you should take to edit your work, in order:
- Design the big-picture story and message from your draft
- Solve the puzzle for flow
- Make each paragraph and sentence serve your goals
- Choose powerful words that say more with less
- Tackle the granular fixes
By moving from big to small, you save time and effort. My best tip for streamlining this process is to edit your work in multiple passes, where each pass has one clear focus. Use my free self-editing checklist to guide you.