You will have to pick up after yourself.
Writers find themselves increasingly on their own. Because proper editing is time-consuming and expensive, publications and publishers have significantly diminished — or outright eliminated — editing staffs. Those who remain are overworked. As a practical matter, your self-editing might turn out to be the only significant editing you get.
All this said, it is still the case that a writer is not necessarily the best judge of their own work. You have a sense in your head of what you meant to say, but a reader may come to a completely different understanding. Adopting the approach of an editor for your own work can give you some protection.
To do that, you have to understand that there are several kinds of editors, and you will need to know how to function as each one.
You will start as your own developmental editor, thinking through possible approaches to your subject and deciding which will be most effective. You’ll work out the focus, the main thing that you want your text to say, and what components you’ll need to carry that out. You may well go through a series of drafts. Read your draft aloud; that will highlight awkwardness and infelicities.
(Here’s a tip: Unless you are desperately pressed by a deadline, you need to walk away from your text between drafts. Have a coffee. Have a smoke. Go for a walk. If you can leave it for a day or two, all the better. It will look different when you come back to it, and you will see more clearly what needs to be done.)
Once you have a draft that you think is ready, you will become your own line editor. You will ask whether that text had the focus you imagined it had; does it say one single clear thing? Can you say in one sentence what your main point is? If not, perhaps you’re unclear on what your main point is. You will look at the structure to see whether it is adequate to the purpose, and you will question whether the organization within that structure makes any sense and can be easily followed. You’ll also check to see that everything is properly sourced and attributed.
(Here’s a tip: If you didn’t work from an outline at the developmental stage, make one now. Not the I. A. 1. a. outline from high school. Make a list of the subtopics under your main topic, paragraph by paragraph if necessary. Do all the parts contribute? Are they arranged in an order that makes it easy for the reader to follow? Would it be better to rearrange the order?)
At the next stage you will be your own copy editor. You will check for factual accuracy throughout. You will establish that the spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage throughout are reliable and in an appropriate register. Don’t be shy about making use of a dictionary, Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage, and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. If there is a house style to which you are meant to conform, conform to it.
(Here’s a tip: If there is some fact — name, date, whatever — that you think you know, look it up. If there’s a point of grammar or usage that you think you have under control, look it up. Proper editors know that they don’t know everything and are forever looking things up. They don’t trust their own memories, so neither should you.)
You’re nearly there, ready to be your own proofreader. Read over your text, word by word; doing it aloud may help you focus. Look for repeated words (the the), dropped words, garble, inconsistencies in typography, any other blemishes.
(Here’s a tip. Run the spell-check as the last thing you do before submitting the text. It will flag common misspellings, typographical errors, and inconsistencies in the spelling of names. But do not trust it too much. It will not help you with the wrong word correctly spelled, and English is crawling with homonyms. You will need to know whether you mean to say premier or premiere, because your spell-check won’t help you.)
And one final caution. There will be errors. There will be things you overlooked, embarrassing things. That you can produce an error-free text is an illusion, and someone will always be ready to point out the deficiencies in yours. This is how editors learn humility. So will you.
John Early McIntyre has been a professional editor for nearly 40 years, more than 32 of them at The Baltimore Sun, where he has headed the copy desk. John earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University, where he was a university fellow. John has taught copyediting at Loyola University Maryland since 1995. A charter member of the ACES: The Society for Editing, he served two terms as its president. John has presented workshops on writing and editing at conferences and publications in the United States and Canada.
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