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How to edit your writing

a selection of resources

No matter which audience you are aiming at, if you want to be published alongside other full time writers, you will need to take a professional attitude to your work. This means that whatever you write must be rigorously checked and edited.

There is simply no room for any slips or mistakes here. If your work contains spelling mistakes or isn’t laid out in the manner a publisher or even a reader expects – then it will immediately be seen as amateurish and not taken seriously.

A spell-checker and a grammar-checker are a basic minimum here. In addition to this you need to know about the issues of editing, house style, and presentation. This means learning how to bring your work into line with what publishers expect.

Subediting for Journalists
This is as up-to-date as it’s possible to be in the world of print publication. It deals with issues of names, dates, places, accuracy, and getting to the point. There are sections on writing headlines and photograph captions. These need to be snappy, but the advice is the same in both cases – make it accurate. It also outlines the main legal and ethical problems confronting subeditors – issues of copyright, libel, slander, defamation, and contempt of court. Particularly useful if you are aiming to write for newspapers or magazines.

Copy Editing
If you want to be really serious about the finer details of editing, this now the UK classic reference guide for anybody preparing text for publication. It is written from the perspective of a professional copy-editor, and covers everything you need to know in preparing a text for publication. The latest edition also deals with issues of copyright, the conventions of presenting text in specialist subjects such as music and mathematics, and preparing work in electronic form. It contains examples of every conceivable in the details of editing and proofreading. Highly recommended. I bought the hardback edition, and it is still in regular use.

Oxford Style Manual
This a compilation in one volume of the Oxford Guide to Style and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. It covers issues such as punctuation, names, capitals, numbers, and how you should deal with music, mathematics, quotations, lists, tables, and even illustrations. There is a special section on foreign languages which begins with the thorny issue of UK and American English. The second part of the manual is a specialist dictionary for writers, journalists, and text-editors. It offers rulings on problematic words and spellings.

The Economist Style Guide
This guide gives general advice on writing skills, points out common errors and cliches, offers guidance on consistent use of punctuation, abbreviations and capital letters. It also contains an exhaustive range of reference material. It also includes a special section on American and British English, a fifty-four page fact checker, and a glossary. I particularly like the section called ‘Common Solecisms’ which warns against popular misunderstandings and points to words often used incorrectly. “Anticipate does not mean expect. Jack and Jill expected to marry; if they anticipated marriage, only Jill might find herself expectant.”

Essential English for Journalists, Editors, and Writers
This was written by former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans. It’s an excellent guide to improving the efficiency of your writing by ‘a process of editorial selection, text editing, and presentation’. He describes the various responsibilities for writing in the newsroom, but then settles down to his main subject – the crafting of good prose – where he is quite clearly at home. There’s plenty of good advice on sentence construction, editing for clarity, choice of vocabulary, avoiding obscurity and abstraction, plus eliminating vagueness and cliche. This is advice from a very experienced newspaper editor.

Publish your writing

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