Your writing is good, but even great writers do better with an edit … or eight. Use these six editing tips to sharpen your writing enough to make your prose bleed.
1. Take a Second Look at Your First Sentence
You might want to trim anything ranging from your first sentence to your first few paragraphs.
The first sentence must nudge your reader toward the second. The second should kick them in front of the third, and so on, until they turn the page or share your content.
Even the sharpest writer warms up during the first few sentences; sitting in the car, motor running, fiddling with the stations. Return for the edit knowing your audience deserves open road rather than the driveway.
2. Get to the Point
Start by knowing what you want to say. Because if you don’t, your reader never will.
A thick wedge of my first book accomplishes little, taking the reader through a long, lingering lunch, including every course and tidbit of conversation. Reading it months afterward, I winced, and laughed at that younger me. Instead of the roughly 20 pages devoted to a scene, a single sentence would have sufficed.
After a long, lingering lunch, they finally drove home.
Whether you’re writing a novel meant to move a reader from chapter to chapter, or a blog post going from bullet point to bullet point, precision is everything. Begin by knowing what you want to say, and you will say it with clarity. Waste too much time and your readers will flee for more fertile grounds.
3. Keep it Simple
Hemingway and Faulkner were adorable when they fought, Faulkner with his language bouquets and Hemingway with his single blooms of perfect structure.
Both were remarkable writers, but Hemingway would have made a better blogger, by far. Few readers sink into their favorite chairs with their favorite blogs (though the iPad may change that). You have minutes, not hours to cement their attention.
Most ideas are simple enough for accessible language. Simplify your thought to keep your reader moved, motivated, and ready for more.
4. Trim the Fat
Your rough drafts, like mine, have enough grizzled fat to spit in a napkin. People over-salt their language with too many adverbs and adjectives. And, like my mom, they do it without even tasting to see the difference. This type of writing renders most sentences less descriptive, and dims their overall power.
Rather than describing every detail of the thug, use a key descriptive term or two, such as, he was built like a fireplug. Let your readers’ imaginations fill the rest. Most readers prefer detailing the central casting in their imaginations, so let them fill the blanks.
Feel free to over-spice your rough drafts, especially if it helps maintain your flow. But, make sure your final edit exorcises the extraneous.
5. Be Credible
You’re passing forward your worldview to your audience. Honor that perspective. Bend reality enough to be interesting, but never enough to reduce audience faith. Hyperbole and exaggeration are great, but best when in service of specific need. Add too much to the truth, and you start subtracting.
This rule isn’t as true with fiction, where nobody forces a writer to settle for fact, so long as the reality adheres to the rules the author sets forth prior. But, for blog posts, readers seek accessible information to improve their lives.
A loss in credibility leads to a loss in value. Use your final edit to maintain your authority in the minds of your audience.
6. Repurpose
Though I don’t know where or when, parts of this post will likely appear somewhere else in the future.
Chefs, carpenters and writers—we use our leftovers to make the remarkable. Like a delicious soup, take your used (and unused) ingredients and turn them into something new.
Tweak each post to that day’s perfection, and set aside the wayward pieces for something else. You’ll always have new topics to tackle, and you never know when one of your seeds will bloom into greatness.
All Great Things Take Time
The longer you spend editing, the easier your writing reads. The more short cuts you take, the more difficult absorbing your message becomes.
It’s important to find your flow and get your ideas on the page, but to advance your writing to the next level—with your ideas leading to conversions, conversation or additional attention—treat your editing as seriously as your first draft.
How do you sharpen your writing? Let us know in the comments.
