1. Stephanie Gayle
EDIT PROSE LIKE A PRO MIT Media Lab
Januar y
27, 2011

2. WHAT IS EDITING?
 A substantive reworking of text with an aim to improve it
 What it isn’t:
 Mere copyediting (checking for typos, basic grammar errors)

3. EGO?
CHECK IT AT THE DOOR

4. TIME
 Multiple drafts are not nice —they are necessary
 Time between drafts helps you get enough distance to spot
error
 Optimize your editing time by doing nothing else
 Go through it all from start to finish —don’t make changes as
you go (Make notations: fix, cut, awkward)

5. READERS
 Good readers are worth their weight in chocolate
 Who to pick?
 Someone who is a good writer
 Someone other than your mother/father/partner
 Someone who knows what you’re writing about
 Someone who doesn’t know what you’re writing about
 Be a reader
 It will help you become a better editor

6. MAKING SENSE
 Keep asking yourself ―Does this make sense?‖
 Do the arguments or does the storyline follow naturally?
 Watch out for abrupt shifts in tone, reasoning, or tense

7. TIPS
 Read aloud
 Keep backups of old drafts
 Routine – carve out space for yourself
 If you get cross-eyed, stop

8. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
 Familiarize yourself with the form
 Keep references to hand
 If you know someone who’s published where you want to, or
been through what you’re doing, ask questions of them

9. CRITICISM?
 Be open to it
 No need to be a sponge
 Some people (editors) will interpret the same prose dif ferently

10. WHAT TO AVOID
 Starting too late (often you can start three paragraphs in )
 Writing tics
 If you know you overuse a word, phrase, or grammar bit (en dashes)
do a ―find‖ search on your document and weed out multiples
 Citations that don’t convey information
 Fillers don’t do anything but add to the word count
 Beautiful sentences that don ’t advance your work
 Repetition
 Smart sounding words

11. GO FORTH AND EDIT!
 The first draft of anything is shit. ~ Ernest Hemingway