Editing can be a long and tedious process, especially when you have to endure a gauntlet of pages and pages (and rounds and rounds) of editing! Although editing is vital to improving your copy and ensuring that your arguments flow and make sense, there are many times where we simply don’t have the luxury of editing at a casual pace – many clients operate on their own schedules and fully expect us to be able to work around them. Assuming we’ve already gone through a round or two of editing, how can we spruce up the editing process while keeping it simple? Join Wordsmith as we examine the finer points of editing!
I said “what” how many times?
The average American adult has a vocabulary of approximately 30,000 words – we say around 16,000 words per day, but only 5% (about 800 words) are unique – this interesting statistic can be transferred over to writing as well. When writing a paper, we often reuse the same words over and over again. Barring the obvious unavoidable suspects (e.g. and or the), some writers have the habit of overusing the same adverbs (e.g. very or that), specific verbs (e.g. said or explain) or a particular noun (e.g. content or colour). Since these words have been a core part of their vocabulary for so long, it often goes unnoticed during editing… but for audiences, it becomes rather apparent during reading – giving the impression that the writer is either a lazy editor, or worse, inexperienced.
When applied correctly to emphasise a particular point or phrase, rhetoric and repetition are fantastic tools. However, when a word is unintentionally repeated too many times, you risk the word becoming meaningless: creating a psychological phenomenon known as semantic satiation.
For example, if you are reading an article about gardening best practices, it’s expected that the term “gardening” will show up a lot. However, if “garden” and its derivative terms are in each and every sentence, readers will inevitably get sick of the word – hence the importance of synonyms to create word variety.
If you are ever unsure if a particular word is being overused, a very simple check is to copy the word and use the “find” function on your word processing software (ctrl + f on Microsoft Word by default) to highlight how many instances the word appears throughout the document. If the word appears more than once or twice per paragraph, you should consider replacing it!
Use your actual voice too
We all have a little voice that lives rent free inside our head – aside from sporadically jumping between reason, desire and condescension, it’s also the same voice that silently interprets the words we see when we read.
For the most part, reading silently is the norm. It would be incredibly obnoxious if everyone suddenly started reading out aloud in public… as if morning commutes weren’t bad enough, imagine having to listen to shouting matches between people reading the news, their work emails or the latest celebrity gossip! However, editing silently may not always yield the best results.
If you are editing your own work or have already sat through several rounds of editing someone else’s content, no doubt you’ve grown a little bored of reading the same thing. To save time and the strain of mental processing, your brain automates the editing process when you edit silently – you may find yourself skimming through certain parts, reading everything in a monotone voice, and most importantly, you don’t have to pause to take a breath between punctuation marks (or the lack thereof).
When you read aloud, you become more aware of everything on the page. You’ll be able to notice typos and grammatical errors you otherwise might have missed. And because your lungs need to take on a more active role, you’ll also find that sentence rhythm and length matter all of a sudden. Are your sentences consistently about the same length? That would indicate a boring and monotonous tempo – consider attaching introductory clauses to the beginning of a sentence, or use en dashes, semi colons and/or commas to combine sentences or extend certain points. However, be wary of making sentences too long! If you get winded while reading, there’s a good chance you don’t have enough punctuation (or have a dreaded run-on sentence). This is a sign you should break up the sentence to make it more manageable!
On the subject of voice, there’s also the active vs passive voice debate. Most writers would recommend you to use the active voice simply because it is more dynamic. Consider the two below:
· Passive: The conference was attended by over 30,000 participants.
· Active: Over 30,000 participants attended the conference.
Due to the way the sentences are structured, active voices are generally shorter than their passive counterparts. More importantly, it identifies the subject of the sentence at the start of the sentence, whereas in the passive voice, the object is introduced first and then shown to be acted upon by the subject. If you want to reduce the drag on the writing’s tonality and tempo, switching from passive to active is a good idea.
However, the active voice isn’t always the best voice to use! For objective writing like news reports, the “passive voice can be a way for journalists to avoid making accusations, but it can also be a way for us journalists to avoid being accused of bias,” says professor of journalism Joshua Adams to North Country Public Radio. If you want to objectively recount something, the passive voice naturally carries a more objective tone… but do be wary about writing too much in the passive voice, unless you want your content to sound drab when read aloud.
As copywriting professionals, editing is a core part of our skillset. As gatekeepers of language, we are responsible for keeping flawed copy away from clients and readers alike. If you ever find yourself tuckered out from editing, try a few of these easy tricks to create an immediate boost in marketing impact!