I spend a whole lot of time talking about editing. Edit your work. OH MY GOD PLEASE @#$@ING EDIT YOUR WORK. But what does that even mean, once you’ve run spellcheck and decided that you don’t want to write at the broken fifth-grade grammar level that is Microsoft’s grammar check? How do you take a new piece to its fullest potential, or revamp and revise an old piece with a great idea now that you’re a good enough writer to manage it?

When I think about editing a story or essay, I think about it on two levels: structural and technical. The structural side is “what is this story I am telling and how am I doing it.” Technical editing is more about commas, spelling, grammar, and word choice. Of course there’s some overlap between the two.

Whether you’re writing a new piece or touching up an old one, though, here’s what you should be looking at, at a bare minimum.

Structural editing

Structural editing is exactly what it sounds like: taking a long hard look at the architecture of your story (yes, nonfiction is storytelling) or essay and making sure the scaffolding supports the pretty gingerbread trim on top. When I think of structural edits, I break them down into three main types: adequacy, order, and obfuscation.

Adequacy

Or, in the words of the internet, is there enough there there? Whether you’re writing an essay or story you have to give the reader enough information to follow you through the arc of plot or persuasion.

Barbara Kingsolver compared the process of writing fiction to nonfiction with a garden metaphor. In fiction, she said, you start from nothing and have to make a garden grow by adding. In nonfiction, you start with a tangled mess of weeds and have to pull enough out to see the garden underneath. This means the editing process for fiction and nonfiction is a little bit different when you’re looking at adequacy.

If you’re a fiction writer, you have to re-read your story and ask “what’s still in my head – but not on the page – that the reader needs?” Unless you’re a fantastic self-editor, at this point in the process it’s tremendously helpful to have a second pair of eyes asking “but where did The Dag even get bolt-cutters?”

If you’re a nonfictioneer, you have to look at every detail and ask “is this here because it happened or because the reader needs to know this to understand my story?” If you’re not pulling out enough weeds, your story will look more like a diary entry. When you re-read, pick up every fact and ask “is it important that it was Wednesday, specifically, because the bus only runs on Wednesdays, or am I just throwing the day of the week in because that’s the day I fell and I should just take that out and get to the meat of the story?”

If you’re writing a persuasive essay,  make sure that all the facts the reader needs in order to agree with your conclusion are included. If there are any major and well-known facts that lead away from your conclusion, you should probably put those in and address them as well, because – adequacy – the reader won’t know that you know about those facts and have come to your conclusion in spite of them because [insert line of reasoning], they’ll just think you’re uninformed and dismiss your conclusion. That doesn’t mean addressing every small fact and counterargument (ugh, booooring) but do be aware of and prepared for pushback on the big ones.

Order

I just turned in edits for a memoir where the writer admonished me in the beginning of the process that she was very attached to her “meandering” style of storytelling, and not to mess with it. For the most part, she was right, even though her plot arcs looked more like Little Billy’s wanderings in Family Circus than a smooth parabola. See, she was a skillful enough writer that as each plot arc circled back to the main point of the story she put in little reminders for the reader of what had happened before so that they connected smoothly back up with the main story after each digression.

Like this author, you probably know that “order” doesn’t have to mean “chronological order.” But what does it mean?

The most important thing about order – and the thing that makes it the hardest part of editing as a writer – is that the reader must have enough information to be interested in and able to comprehend the next paragraph you write, at all times. If your reader is lost for more than the few words it takes to reorient them in a point-of-view switch or time jump, you’ve probably lost them entirely.

When I wrote my first novel, I made one pass of edits with a legal pad beside me. As each character’s name came up I wrote it down and put a little note about what page number it was and whether I introduced them and described them. At the end of the book I found that some characters had been introduced three or four times. Others had just been mentioned by name the first few times and introduced later. One had been lost entirely when I moved a chapter around. Going back through and making sure I introduced the first time we saw a character and reminded every subsequent time there had been more than a ten-page gap between appearances of a minor character?

Not gonna lie, guys. The actual worst. But so important.

If you’re making your argument or reaching your punchline before the reader has enough information to understand why it’s important or funny, you might as well have entirely skipped your adequacy review.

Obfuscation

I get it. You don’t want your work to read like “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” But there’s such a thing as being too coy.

Even if you pass the adequacy and order tests, there’s a quick way to lose your readers. Just make your language or sentence structure so difficult that your meaning is lost while the reader struggles to parse your text. While you want to “show, not tell,” make sure you’re showing enough that the reader can figure out what’s going on. This is especially true if you tend to get bogged down in pretty synonyms. If a word isn’t in your natural vocabulary, don’t use it. It won’t sound right with the “voice” of your piece, and the odds are good that you’ll be using it wrong. Go ahead and use the thesaurus to remind you of words you already know, but don’t try to use new ones you find there until you’re confident that you understand their nuances and implications.

Technical editing

Nothing kills a story or essay faster for me than seeing a bunch of typos. Runner-up is misspellings. Both of these things tell me the writer isn’t taking themself or their audience seriously enough to produce a professional product. Let’s run through a few of the most common other technical issues that show up, so you can recognize them when you run across them in your own or other people’s work.

Punctuation and spelling

Just kidding. Only jerks lump punctuation and spelling together, because they take totally different editing techniques to catch.

punctuation

Commas and apostrophes and semicolons, oh my!

Unless you’re writing incredibly simple sentences and not using any dialogue, you’ve probably screwed up your punctuation at some point. Everyone has their own punctuation nemeses (mine is “inserting a comma every time I would breathe if I were saying this out loud”) so I’m not going to try to guess what yours is. I am, however, going to direct you to the Purdue OWL (online writing lab) for a refresher. Even if you think you have punctuation nailed down (spoilers: you don’t. really. trust me.) go ahead and read through the lessons and labs at the OWL. I learn something new every time, and so will you.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

spelling

Look. You’re a relatively adultish person navigating the interwebs. You know that there’s three basic parts to spelling. First, there’s the actual spelling mistakes and typos that spellcheck will catch. Then there’s the typos that make actual words that spellcheck won’t catch. Finally, there’s the times that spellcheck or Siri or whoever’s responsible for you is actively trying to screw you over by suggesting the wrong homonym or homophone.

The first one’s easy-peasy. Use spellcheck. Use it, use it, use it. If you’re writing a fantasy story, teach it the names of the alien races you’re inventing. If you’re writing nonfiction, teach it your mother’s maiden name.

The second one’s harder. Did you know you can actually delete words from your computer’s spellcheck dictionary? If you have a real-word typo you make pretty often, consider doing that. Especially if it’s embarrassing. Need an example? I wrote a 75 page white paper on public interest law. My computer doesn’t know that “pubic” is a word. Related? mmmmmmmmaybe.

The third thing is the worst. When you’re typing along and your computer underlines “you’re” and suggests “your” and you’re not sure which one is… you know, they’re all starting to look wrong now. LOOK IT UP. If you know it’s one of your downfalls, stick a reminder to your monitor.

Idiomatic phrases

Bet you didn’t expect to find this under technical edits, did you? But an incorrectly used idiomatic phrase is a technical, not a structural error. I’m going to go ahead and list some common errors, but you might want to look up your favorite idiomatic phrases and make sure you’re using (and spelling) them correctly!

Homed in on

Homed. Like a homing missile. Not “honed in on.” You didn’t sharpen anything.

Ran the gantlet

A gantlet is two lines of armed people that you run between. A gauntlet is a glove. So you can throw down the gauntlet to issue a challenge, but you ran the gantlet to bring your nephew back that robot on Black Friday.

Passes muster

Not passes mustard. Not passes the mustard. There are no condiments or excretions involved; this phrase invokes early-morning military inspections.

Begs the question

NOT THE SAME AS RAISES THE QUESTION. If something begs the question, it’s avoiding having to ask that question. Like “apples are delicious because they grow on trees.” Or, more simply, “apples are delicious because they are yummy.” The first begs the question “are all things that grow on trees delicious” and the second begs the question “um ‘scuse me what.”

One and the same

Not “one in the same.” The one thing isn’t contained in the other, it’s identical to it. AND.

Statute of limitations

A statute is another word for a law. A statue stands still. The statute of limitations cuts off the time past which you can be tried under a law. A statue of limitations… I don’t even know. I guess it’s a weeping angel maybe?

For all intents and purposes

Not intensive purposes. Not. Guys, I cannot be intense enough. Intent matters. Just, come on, think for a minute. Intents and purposes are kind of the same thing, right? They’re stuff you mean? What’s an intensive purpose, even, maybe something you focus on really hard for a minute or… no.

Free rein

In this case, the messed up version, “free reign,” actually kind of makes some sense. It would mean that you rule freely and can do what you like, right? Except that the actual phrase, free rein, comes from letting go of a horse’s reins and letting it have its own way. So use it right.

T-T-t-th-that’s all, folks

Just kidding. There are plenty more structural and technical editing tricks, from reading your work backward (headache, but worth it if you need to catch all your typos) to finding (and paying) a good editor. Still, the tips in this post will take you a long way, whether you’re writing a new work or digging something out of your archives that you think you’ll do a better job with at this point in your writing career.

Good luck, and good editing!