Definition of Editing
Definition of Editing
We’re very excited and pleased that you’ve chosen this course to help improve your editing skills.
If you like this course, you may also be interested in delving further into English grammar with the Grammar Camp course, which will teach you the ins and outs of English grammar. It includes such topics as parts of speech like nouns, verbs, and modifiers; punctuation and spelling; and sentence parts and patterns.
Another course, Proofreading Camp, helps you polish your proofreading skills, and includes valuable information on proofreading format/layout, using proofreading software, and finding proofreading jobs.
Try them today!
Editing involves making revisions to and suggestions about the content of a document. It includes improving the accuracy of language, the flow, the organization and structure, and the overall readability of the text. It also involves checking for grammatical and spelling errors.
In other words, editing involves a detailed review of a document while making additions, deletions, or other changes to conform to a specific, agreed-upon standard in order to prepare the document for a specific audience. A document should be edited at least once before it is proofread.
An editor must have knowledge of the style to which the document at hand must conform and must have the ability to make quick, sound decisions. Editors must also pay attention to every word on the page; however, the types of changes an editor makes depend on whether the person is doing substantive editing or mechanical editing.
Substantive editing (also called developmental editing) deals with the organization and presentation of existing content. Substantive editing involves rephrasing for smoothness or improved clarity; reorganizing, reducing, or simplifying documentation; and modifying explanatory tables, graphs, and charts.
Mechanical editing requires an editor to look for consistency in capitalization, spelling, hyphenation, and table formatting, as well as the use of abbreviations, punctuation, and numbers. An editor must also root out differences between the text and the tables, illustrations, and citations. While mechanical editing may seem a lot like proofreading, remember that editing is more comprehensive than proofreading. Mechanical editing can affect the content of the document, while proofreading should never affect the content of the document. We'll talk a little bit more about the differences between editing and proofreading shortly.
Editing requires not only English language skills but also the intuition to know, at a glance, what is right or wrong on the page.
An editor must gain a "feel" for a project's meaning and intention. An editor must look for consistency and clarity and should be able to look at any piece of writing without bias.
An experienced editor recognizes unusual figures of speech and peculiar usage. He or she will know when to make an actual change, when to suggest one, and how to do so tactfully. Helping the author find his or her "voice" is a part of this process.
In work done by an effective editor, the mechanics are seamless and nothing is taken away from the author's message or the reader's experience.
Although there is a certain degree of overlap in the types of work done by editors and proofreaders, the editing and proofreading processes should be kept separate.
Editing should be the first thing done to a manuscript after it has been written. A document might go through several rounds of editing, and each round of editing might necessitate massive changes to the content of the document. The ultimate goal of the process of editing is to help hone the message or story.
Proofreading should be the final step in manuscript preparation and should be performed subsequent to editing. If the goal of editing is to help craft a better message, the goal of proofreading should be to make sure the message is error free.
Proofreading is a careful and methodical search for misspellings, typographical errors, and omitted words or word endings.
Proofreading is most effectively done by someone unfamiliar with the work. Errors may be difficult to spot in one's own work or a familiar document because the eye sees what it expects to see. If you proofread your own document, you may end up reading what you intended to write instead of what you actually wrote. Most people devote only a few minutes to proofreading with the hope they will catch the glaring errors that jump out from the page. However, after a writer has been working long and hard on a document, a second set of eyes will be able to catch many mistakes the author might otherwise miss.
Proofreading must go beyond simply using a spell-checker, style checker, or text analyzer feature on a computer, as these tools are not reliable.
Anomalies such as different language sets (e.g., American, Australian, or British English), faulty assumptions about grammar and sentence structure (made by the program), embedded information, and field-specific terminology mean that a document must be reviewed thoroughly without relying on the spelling or grammar checkers.
A proofreader looks for the kinds of mistakes that are left behind by computer spell-checkers, such as commonly confused homonyms like their/there/they're, which/witch, and its/it's.
We'll get into the specifics of editing throughout this training module, and we'll talk more about proofreading in another training module. For now, suffice it to say that editing involves a detailed analysis of the content of a document. It involves a thorough examination of the text, as well as the quality of the writing. Editing is comprehensive, and editors need to be prepared to work intensely on a document to perform a quality edit.
Proofreading involves a final review of a document to detect any minor problems with grammar, spelling, or punctuation.
Last Updated: 09/29/2022