Everyone can benefit from using an editor, but the specific benefits depend on what each writer needs. To see other writing profiles, click here. The intellectual in the weeds can use an editor to see their own writing through the eyes of a reader. An editor’s changes and comments can bring to light what a writer is trying to do in a text and help them achieve it.
The familiarity with which we know our own lives is sometimes disabling.*
verlyn Klinkenborg, several short sentences about writing, pg 50
Writing is a special instance of that.
In responding to your own prose, you’re responding to some sense of yourself,
And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible to yourself,
Camouflaged by familiarity.
One basic strategy for revision is becoming a stranger to what you’ve written.
An editor is a special kind of stranger to your writing. You can’t read your sentences through eyes that have not read them before. You can’t forget all of the outside knowledge you bring to the text or all the writing choices you made in composing the sentences. You can and should use various strategies to try to create some distance between you and your writing: reading it aloud, putting it down for a month or two, switching to reading it from a screen to paper or vice versa. But you can also use an editor to give yourself a fresh perspective on your text.
An editor can’t help but be a stranger to your writing—all they have to go on is the sentence you put on the page. So they can give you valuable information that you cannot obtain firsthand for yourself. But an editor is also unlike other strangers who will read your writing.
An editor has the time and attention your colleagues do not, to look at every sentence as it is and double-check that it is as it should be. She has distance from your subject and has not read all your source materials, so she notices moments where you have over- or underexplained. She has the expertise and resources to identify and fix simple writing problems quickly. She can ensure your expertise gets translates into reader-friendly prose. And most importantly she works for both you and the reader. She wants your writing to be as strong as possible, and she wants to remove obstacles that prevent the reader from following your ideas.
An editor works for both you and the reader. She wants your writing to be as strong as possible, and she wants to remove obstacles that prevent the reader from following your ideas.
Feedback from a benevolent stranger can be key at several stages of the writing process.
In earlier stages, it can help you discover what you have to say, as in what you want to say in the first place. It can also help you discover what you have to say, as in what you need to say in order to communicate what you want to say. In early stages of writing, getting this kind of feedback on excerpts as short as 250-500 words can motivate you to keep going. It can give you direction for how to go on. This process often saves time and energy on false starts and complete rewrites. More feedback earlier, whether from an editor or a peer, helps you clarify each step—before you build an edifice on a foundation, only to discover the foundation needs reworking.
In later stages of writing, feedback from a benevolent stranger prepares you for feedback from less benevolent strangers. An editor identifies any parts of your manuscript that need another round of revision while there is still time to make changes. Before a higher stakes reader encounters it–whether reviewer, advisor, or member of your target audience. Using an editor gives you the opportunity to respond to reader’s concerns before you send your work to its intended readers.
At Writing is Thinking, I recognize that sentence level editing (line editing) leads directly to the question, “What are you doing here, with this sentence?” It is up to the author to figure out what she wants to be doing, and often the process of seeing what she is (or isn’t doing) clarifies this for her. When I examine what sentences actually say, I help clients identify what they haven’t said. Through this process, they discover what other sentences are needed.
I prompted one client to write a preliminary draft without citations, so he could see the thread of his own thought from start to finish. He hadn’t identified his own contributions, even to himself, because his draft was cluttered with mentioning everything everyone else says on the subject. In editing his sentences, I kept asking, “Do you mean to be saying that this idea comes from X scholars?” We discovered that he was presenting original interpretations of other research but citing his sentences as if the ideas came from those other papers. He had to decide which interpretations were key to his point and then develop those interpretations with expanded explanations. He had to also decide which interpretations were superfluous and should be cut. These decisions were based on identifying his core contributions and using these to test which pieces needed to stay or go.
With another client, I saw that she had a series of interesting concrete examples, but she was vague about what the reader was supposed to take away from each example. There were several possible theses she had introduced, but she hadn’t shown the reader how each example worked or which point it was supposed to show. She hadn’t realized what she hadn’t said. When I gave her my comments, she discovered that she didn’t have a ready answer for my questions. She was able to revise her ideas—and her sentences—to provide more detailed analysis.
With a third client, I suggested he completely rewrite one sub-section in an otherwise strong paper. He introduced a new theory from a related field but had jumped into complex analysis without presenting the basics of the theory. He had not given the reader an introduction or reminder about what field the theory was developed in, what its key ideas are, and why he’s bringing it up. The reader needs those basics to follow the analysis he wanted to do with theory. This client’s rewrite was exquisite—perfectly clear and powerful. He knew what he wanted to say, but he hadn’t realized that he hadn’t said it in the initial draft.
Each of these clients learned something about their writing and their thinking by seeing it through an interested reader’s eyes. They were able to discover what they were trying to do with their sentences and make changes to ensure they actually achieved it.
* I am in the process of learning about how our casual language use can be ableist. I’m learning to be careful about what I describe as a disability and how my word choices contribute to devaluing disability. I’m leaving this Klinkenborg quote as it is, but I’m also making an editor’s note: this use of “disabling” needs to be carefully reconsidered.