“The most important remains—editing, and it’s going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details.” Mikhail Bulgakov
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” Mark Twain
“Write drunk, edit sober.” Ernest Hemingway
The internet’s full of insightful and/or pithy sayings from famous authors about editing. I’ve included a few of my favorites above.
But what exactly is editing?
For many people, it’s copyediting—fixing grammar, spelling, punctuation. Some would classify what Twain references in his amusingly flippant advice as copyediting, but it’s perhaps more accurately classified as line editing (polishing prose) since there’s nothing inherently incorrect about the word “very”—or “damn,” for that matter.
When I worked as a writing tutor in a college writing center, I often had students ask me to proofread. For them, proofreading was a synonym for copyediting. I wasn’t allowed to do either at that job, but what a publisher would define as proofreading was not at all what they were asking for anyway.
And yet for other writers, when they talk about editing, they’re not even thinking about the sentences they write but instead feedback on the actual elements of the narrative—the structure, the plot, the characters.
So, which one is editing and which one isn’t?
All of them.
Hopelessly confused?
Don’t be!
In my blog series “What Is Editing?” I’ll be discussing more in-depth the types of editing there are—what they entail, when they happen in the editorial process, why they’re important, if you need them and if you don’t—to help you better understand what editing is.
I don’t personally offer all the different types of editing that I’ll discuss as services, but I know this is a confusing topic for many of the independent authors who contact me for work and quotes on their projects. Knowing what kind of editing you need for your manuscript is just as important for you the author as it is for me as your editor.
Read the whole “What Is Editing” series:
