The dirty little secret of professional editors: there is no secret

Perhaps 95% of basic sentence-level edits are straightforward and rote—repeatable, habitual, even Pavlovian.

Editors often can’t turn those reflexes off. That’s why you may find your editor friends grousing about playbills and restaurant menus.

The good news is that you can learn the patterns of editing (what we call standard edits)—not to annoy your friends by critiquing the church newsletter, but because doing so is the fastest way to write clearly and quickly.

That’s the foundation of the ClearWriter system. And we’ve already done much of the work, by compiling the standard edits we’ve discovered in our daily work as writers and editors.

Consider phrases like the field of (as in “the field of economics”), the area of (“the area of education research”), the problem of (“the problem of poverty”), and the like.

These phrases are fat that lards your writing.

Economics is a field; education research, an area; poverty, a problem.

Cut them.

Also easily fixed with standard edits is the tendency to use overweight words—words that are long, abstract, or obscure—where simpler words will do. So change component to part, lengthy to long, and utilization to use.

Such changes may seem to make little difference, and it’s true that they reflect preferences rather than rules. But you’ll be amazed at the results when you iterate these edits over a manuscript.

In future blog entries, we’ll talk more about the patterns we’ve found in editing. The best places to learn about them, however, are in our online writing training and in Edit Yourself, by ClearWriter founder Bruce Ross-Larson. Another good resource is our editing software, ClearEdits, which puts an editor inside your computer—taking advantage of the repeatability of our standard edits.