Writing

5 Editing Tips for Writers to Edit Own Writing

September 20, 2016

Yes… Yes, we all know that the writer’s work is to carve his/her imagination onto the piece of paper but if you really look at the written piece, then possibly you may get deflected from the words itself. One can write the same phrase in different versions of the grammatical language.

Take an example. You went to a restaurant and the waiter asked, Would you like to have Chicken? You paused for a moment and answered, I don’t want no chicken. Now, as you have said you do not want no chicken, essentially this sentence suggests that you do. So sometimes what you want to deliver through your words will not be conveyed correctly.

Every writer needs an editor, call it a fact and accept the reality. But there are five common fixes that editors do in nearly every project. Learn to correct them by yourself and you’ll take your writing to a more professional, marketable, and persuasive level. Ready to learn some editing tips to improve your own writings?

5 Editing Tips for Writers to Edit Own Writings

Tip #1. Sentences can only do one thing at a time.

Sometimes when you are writing very fluently, you forget to bother about the length of a sentence. Stop right there. It can cause harm to your writing and the reader will go out of breath while reading through the long phrases that you have left for him.

Have you ever heard of a 5-year-old kid run out of breath before he finishes his sentence? The trick is simple. To design a sentence long enough so that it does not make your readers breathless, you need a noun, you need a verb, and you might need an object.

Tip #2. Don’t make paragraphs BIG & BULKY.

This is one of the very basic editing tips for writers. You must understand that a paragraph denotes the start of a new phase or a plot into your story. It is very important to write in such a way that your entire work is divided into small paragraphs.

Every time you address a new idea, hit enter. Short paragraphs are the most readable; not many of them should be more than three or four sentences long.

Tip #3. Omit the purposeless words.

All of us were taught this in high school, but at that time we were way too busy to listen to the right things. Actually, it’s not easy to cut off the words from your own writing. It’s like you have been asked to distil the salt from the water.

These extra words sometimes make your sentence sound weak, so to make them effective you should omit the meaningless words. Let’s understand this editing tip for writers with an example.

For an example:
The entire world rewrites as the world.
She knew that it was beautiful rewrites as she knew it was beautiful.

Tip #4. Clever Use of –ing.

Nouns ending in -ing are okay. (Perfect writing, good fishing.) But constructions like “I am playing,” or “The new team will be playing” are relatively weak. Rewrite them to “I run” and “the new team will play.” See, with this editing tip, you can say its no rocket science!