Careful editing can be the difference between an effective piece of copy that compels your reader to act and one that leaves your reader confused and unimpressed. Edited copy shows your reader that you are serious about what you are publishing and that you take pride in your work. Ultimately, your copy is a reflection of yourself. And who doesn’t want to give their clients or readers a great first impression?
Last week I talked about how proofreading can increase your value. Now let’s look at seven ways you can actually improve your editing process to help you write effective copy:
1. Assess Your Plot Development
Before you perform your final edits for grammar and punctuation, it is important to edit your piece for clarity, plot development, and organization.
Understanding how your points connect and build off each other is vital to creating a powerful piece of copy.
When you are assessing your copy’s organization and clarity, you might need to move entire paragraphs or sentences to provide a clearer, more convincing argument. This can also help you see where you need stronger arguments or more facts to back up your claims.
2. Create Strong Sentence Structure
Once your copy is organized for clarity, it is time to work on your sentence structure. Powerful copy is clear, easy to read, and consistent. Using parallel structure, eliminating wordiness, and fixing run-on sentences demonstrates a level of professionalism that your readers need in order to trust you as a reliable source of information. To actually improve your editing process, you must learn how to form strong sentences. If you don’t, your writing will just confuse your reader.
3. Identify Common Punctuation Mistakes
When I think back to my English classes over the years, the many punctuation and grammar rules are overflowing in my brain. I am so grateful for the solid grammatical base that I received from a young age. I wouldn’t be where I am now without it.
In fact, I actually still remember all of the prepositions because of a song my high school English teacher ingrained in my brain.
Knowing these rules and how to apply them to your writing is key to producing copy that is polished and effective. In addition to knowing the rules, you must apply them consistently throughout your entire piece of copy and across all of your forms of communication. For example, if you choose to use the Oxford comma, use it every time on all of your social media posts, your website, your marketing materials, and anything else you produce.
Not applying these rules results in common punctuation mistakes, such as the comma splice. So, what exactly is a comma splice? It is when you join two independent clauses with only a comma in order to form one sentence. An example of this is: “The man called the store, he wanted to buy the hat.” The two clauses are incorrectly joined only by a comma. You can correct this common punctuation error by including a coordinating conjunction after the comma, changing the comma to a semicolon, or splitting the text into two separate sentences.
4. Look for Homophones
Some words are easy to miss when they are misused. These tricky words even slip past spell-checker. Why? Because spell-checker does not read for context, only actual spelling. These tricky words are called homophones, which are words that sound the same yet are different in spelling and meaning. Homophones such as compliment and complement can be easy to mix-up when you are writing (even if you know their proper uses).
“There read and black cat eight his bag of food in won knight.” Wow, that was hard to write and even read! Is that sentence correct? Not even close! Did spell-check flag any of the errors? No! Now do you see why homophones are so easy to let slip through the editing process?
Using the wrong word can be confusing to your reader, give the impression of a lack of knowledge, and undermine your credibility. When you are editing, you need to read slowly and carefully in order to catch these types of errors.
5. Be Consistent with Formatting
Be consistent with your formatting choices, such as whether or not you should use one or two spaces between sentences. My husband and I even differ on our views about this one. As you can see from my writing, I only use one space between my sentences. However, if I am writing copy for a client who uses two spaces in all of their copy, I will adjust my style so as to be consistent with their style guide. Other examples of formatting issues to monitor are paragraph indention, fonts, spaces above or below bulleted lists, text wrapping, or headings.
6. Read Your Writing Aloud
When you read your writing aloud, it helps you to hear where sentences or sections of the piece do not flow well. Your ear will pick up on awkward phrasing that you might not catch when just reading through it in your head. Listen for errors. If you stumble over a phrase or sentence while reading it aloud, mark it. After you’ve completely read it aloud, go back and fix those spots you’ve marked. I believe that reading your copy aloud is a vital way to improve your editing process. I do it every time I write or edit something. If you were a mouse in my office, you would think I was crazy, sitting at my computer talking to myself all day.
7. Delay Your Editing
Setting your writing aside for a little while can help you see it with fresh eyes. When you have been writing for a while and reading the same section over and over, you begin to gloss over the little details.
Let your writing get cold, not just lukewarm, before you touch it again.
If you wait and revisit the material later (preferably an entire day later), it gives you a fresh perspective. At this point, little errors, awkward phrasing, or major argument flaws are much easier to spot.
If you don’t remember all your grammar and punctuation rules from high school, or simply don’t care to remember them, The Inspired Copy can help you with that. Use your time for more profitable endeavors and hire me to edit your copy! Send me a message, and let’s talk about how I can help you improve your editing process and produce effective, edited copy!
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