Editing

I have informally edited pieces for peers and friends before, but my Professional Writing Capstone in Fall of 2019 was the first time I really used the correct editing marks and researched into the skills required to edit a piece well. Below are four examples of editing that were part of my final capstone project for that semester.

Article: "Hmong Society Annual Harvest Festival"

Before

After

Overall, I felt that the editing of this piece went well. This article was written by a senior-level Communications major, who very clearly understands the nuances of writing in this field.

I was only able to catch three AP Style errors specifically, which I felt was sufficient. AP Style is the standard format and rule book for journalistic pieces such as this, so I would expect the writer to make very few of these types of mistakes.

Most of the other errors I encountered were simply problems that I had with the readability of their piece. They had several run-on sentences in which I felt the reader could easily get lost, such as:

This sentence has a lot of commas, clauses, and thoughts jumbling around. This may make it harder for the reader to follow what's going on, as opposed to a few more straightforward sentences.

I was also a bit worried about the first part of that sentence, “Though she arrived halfway through the festivities…” This sentence is discussing a professor, but even if it wasn’t, I’d be worried that would reflect poorly on the individual. One of the four mainstays of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics is to minimize harm, and even though this sentence is not exceedingly harmful, I would suggest the author consider the relevancy of the professor's lateness to the piece.

The author also had a few sentences that used passive voice:

I feel like it would have helped their sentences flow better if they had used active voice instead of passive voice. Using active voice can create stronger sentences that are clearer and more concise.

The rest of the issues I noticed were a bit more minor, such as capitalization errors, missing commas, a dangling modifier, and a spelling mistake; relatively easy fixes.

View the fully-edited document here.

Blog Post: "The Exorcist in Foster"

Before

After

This piece was by far the easiest and most enjoyable to edit. This author had very few errors, stayed on track, and kept their audience in mind. There were very few points where I was lost, confused, or struggling to follow what they were discussing.

Most of the errors in this piece were of a simple nature like grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Punctuation in particular seemed to be a recurring issue in this piece:

Just in those three sentences, there were five punctuation errors: two em dash errors, and three comma errors.

The writer also had a few long paragraphs that I felt they could break up, to make their piece more readable. There were also a few times I would have liked them to clarify the subject of the sentence, instead of using ‘it’ and ‘they’:

Who is the ‘they’ the author refers to? I believe we’re meant to assume that they’re talking about songwriters, but I feel a bit more specificity could have helped the readers follow the sentence better.

This piece has already been published on the author’s website, but for future work, I would recommend they have someone edit the piece beforehand, just to help with all of those nitpicky errors.

View the fully-edited document here.

Manuscript: "Arc 2" Chapter 1

Before

After

I selected just a chapter of this piece to edit; it’s chapter one of the second book, so I assume that the reader goes into it knowing the background and story of the characters. This piece had a fair amount of errors, but it was also the longest piece that I edited, so the error rate may be proportional.

One of the many issues I noticed over and over were extra spaces:

The extra space at the beginning of the second sentence is highly noticeable and a bit distracting. Most of the extra spaces were at the beginning of sentences, so I believe this author may be thinking that the convention is still to double space at the beginning of sentences.

The author also follows a very peculiar sentence structure:

Usually, their sentences are made much easier to read simply by switching some of them around; for example, changing the location of ‘Constantly’ in the above sentence to be the third word in the sentence.

The author also had quite a few run-on sentences that could have easily been fixed by splitting the sentence in two. They also had a bit of trouble with quotation structure; they would put periods at the end of quotations when there was still a dialogue tag to follow, or capitalize the first word of the dialogue tag in between.

Overall, I feel that this author could really benefit from working with an editor to improve their piece. Most of their errors were simple and would have been caught by a once-over from an editor.

View the fully-edited document here.

Fan-Fiction Manuscript: "Transformers: Mutants" Chapter 1

Before

After

This is actually the second edit of this piece because the first edit was so covered in red marks that it was almost impossible to read. I had the author take all of my recommendations from the first edit, make changes, and then send me back an updated copy to re-edit.

I also feel it’s important to note that this author is an English as a Second Language writer. The second edit was a significant improvement over the first; the only issues left were mainly spelling and punctuation errors:

In this sentence, the author is missing the comma at the end of the quotation, and they misspelled the character’s name. There were several errors like this throughout the piece, but they are fairly easy fixes and could have been remedied by having an editor go over the piece.

Other than the spelling and punctuation errors, there were a few consistency errors. For example, in the above sentence they say that only Elite Guard soldiers can enter the Record Room. However, at the end of the chapter they find a character in the Record Room who is not a member of the Elite Guard (and the doors are not destroyed, either). Simple clarification of instances like that would help the readers instead of confusing them.

I had a few general recommendations for this piece, including that the author change up some of their dialogue tags. For example, instead of using the format of "(subject) said," using more description, such as "(subject) sighed, rubbing his face wearily." I also recommended that they add more descriptions in general; descriptions of the settings, the characters, their emotions, etc.

View the fully-edited document here.