Editing is the process of working with a text to review it, improve it and ensure that it\u2019s achieving its aims. The tricky thing about editing at university is that you have to act as editor to yourself \u2013 and I certainly find it\u2019s hard to get the distance you need from your own writing to see it objectively! Checklists for editing work often include items such as \u2018are your points clear\u2019? \u2018Do your sentences make sense?\u2019 And the problem is, of course, how are you supposed to know? Well of course your writing seems clear to you, you wouldn\u2019t have written it that way otherwise!<\/p>\n
This is the first of a series of posts which aims to give you some practical strategies, not only what to look for, but how to look, and how to tell if your writing really does what you think it does. We use many of these in our work in the Writing Development Centre.<\/p>\n
First of all, to get an objective and accurate perspective on your writing, you need to find a way to get some critical distance from your own writing. Working with someone else\u2019s writing is easy, but how do you create that distance for a text which you wrote yourself and which is possibly so familiar to you that you can\u2019t see it at all any more?<\/p>\n
Seeing it with new eyes<\/strong> Posted by Helen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Editing is the process of working with a text to review it, improve it and ensure that it\u2019s achieving its aims. The tricky thing about editing at university is that you have to act as editor to yourself \u2013 and … Continue reading
\nEditing your own work means seeing it afresh through the eyes of your reader. One of the key strategies for successful editing is to make the text seem alien to yourself. As its author, you are often too close to it to see it objectively, and you are likely to see what you think it says, and not what it really does say. You can achieve this critical distance simply by putting it to one side for a while. Realistically, however, not all of us are organised enough to have time to do this before the deadline, or unforeseen issues might have arisen which mean that there is less time than anticipated to edit a final draft \u2013such is the unpredictable nature of research. Other strategies for seeing your own writing afresh include:<\/p>\n\n