ABSTRACT
I think editing is the easiest part … you just have to check for the obvious stuff: spelling, grammar, all that. And if it’s not obvious to you, this is the part where someone else is welcome to jump in and help. (Drew Lamm, cited in Fletcher, 2000, p. 84)
Yesterday I had to get a letter out to a publisher, and I reread it about three times, each round making subtle changes in wording so that the message was more precise. (Priscilla Griffith, former editor of The Reading Teacher, Co-Editor of Action in Teacher Education, and Chair of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum at the University of Oklahoma, personal communication, July 3, 2002)
Editing is finishing. Editing is making a text convey precisely what you intend to say in the clearest way possible. Editing is sentence-level work, attended to after a text’s ideas are in order. (Fulwiler, 2002, p. 178)
If you can say it in plain English-DO SO! (Robert Weir, Associate Professor of History and Liberal Studies, Bay Path College, MA, personal communication, March 9, 2004)
As a prelude to this chapter, we want to share some truths with you about our previous conceptions of editing. Until we authored this book, we never gave much thought to the editing process. In past years, we think we did a fairly good job of editing our own writing, and we helped our students edit their own work, but we never examined the editing process in any detailed way. We just edited on automatic pilot. We didn’t think there was very much to editing-just attend to errors and oversights related to the mechanics of writing. In fact, we dreaded writing this chapter because we believed that
editing was a dull and boring topic. We worried that we wouldn’t have much to say to our readers. After all, there are a multitude of stylebooks that offer advice about using appropriate conventions of written language.
