It’s time to talk about editing. In this chapter you will discover why it’s even more important than writing. It’s the process of taking what you’ve written and making it as good as it can possibly be.

No matter how much effort and expertise you’ve put into your writing, the first version can almost always be improved. There’s a reason newspapers, magazines and book publishers employ editors: they take the writers’ work and make it better.

Some types of business writing will require other people to read and criticise your work. For example, you might be writing about something that the firm’s lawyers need to approve. Or you might be writing something that will go up on the company blog and the marketing people want to make sure you communicate a particular message. But even if you don’t have to do those things, your writing will still benefit from editing.

If you have a colleague who can cast a critical eye over your writing and make constructive suggestions, that’s great. If you don’t, you can be your own editor.

But first …

LET GO OF YOUR EGO

When you’re editing a piece of writing, you’ve got to take a step back. Yes, you should be proud of it. And yes, you deserve to be carried around the office on your colleagues’ shoulders for producing such a great piece of work. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it even better.

It’s really important that you’re open to criticism, especially from other people. Writers love to moan about editors being their ‘natural enemy’, as Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin puts it with his tongue firmly in his cheek (Martin, 1979), but very few people don’t benefit from editors or editing. It’s like optimising code, removing duplicate data or compressing files. You’ve created something, and now you want to maximise its efficiency.

There are four key things to look for when you’re editing:

Let’s take each one in turn.

SIMPLICITY

Appropriately enough, this one’s simple. You’re looking for anything that makes your writing less friendly to the reader: too-long paragraphs, unnecessary use of big words, the passive voice, jargon and anything else that might make the reader go ‘eh?’.

BREVITY

If your memo about the office fridge is six pages long, it probably needs to be cut down a bit. It’s very easy to write too much – we do it all the time because it’s often easier to write too much and then make it punchy by cutting it down – and some of the things mentioned in Chapter 5, ‘Fight The Flab’, are easy to spot and take out. For example, the passive voice (‘it was decided that’) and irrelevant background information should be the first things to go.

When you’re editing a piece of business writing, the constant question should be: does it need this? Would this paragraph work just as well without that sentence, or that sentence work just as well without those words? If the answer is yes, cut out the bits you don’t need.

ACCURACY

Accuracy is particularly important if you’re communicating detailed instructions for somebody to follow, or if you’re describing something compulsory, such as regulations on data protection, or if you’re using figures. However, it also applies to every kind of business writing. Are you presenting your personal opinion as a fact? You should make that clear (assuming, of course, that the piece of writing wouldn’t benefit from cutting that bit out completely). Are any sections unclear? Pretend you don’t know all the things you know about the subject. Is there anything that would make you scratch your head in confusion?

Don’t forget about spelling, grammar and punctuation too. Automatic spellcheckers and grammar checkers are reasonably good, but they don’t always catch things such as homophones, which are words that sound the same but are spelled differently. ‘Their’, ‘they’re’ and ‘there’ are homophones. So are write/right, to/two and mail/male. If you are relying on a computer’s spelling or grammar checker it’s a good idea to get a colleague to look over your work as well.

Last, but not least, watch out for excessive capitalisation: using caps LIKE THIS is perceived as shouting, and blocks of capitalised text are tiring to read.

EFFECTIVENESS

Remember when I said you should never start writing until you know what you’re trying to achieve? It’s time to see if you’ve done what you set out to do. Does the writing make it clear what, if anything, you want the reader to do? Have you stuck to the topic without going off on tangents or cramming some unrelated things into the same document? Have you got your point across as effectively as possible? Are you using positive action words that make things sound interesting?

One of the best ways to check for all of these things is to read your writing out loud. Sentences that look just fine on paper can have you gasping for breath long before you reach the end. Clichés tend to sound trite when you say them aloud. And the very fact you feel a bit daft speaking out loud means you’ll have a lot less tolerance for overly wordy or woolly language.

Another way to spot bits you can improve is to print your writing onto paper, take a bit of time away from it and then look at the printout with fresh eyes. There’s something about reading on screens that makes it easy to miss mistakes; when you read the same thing from paper, the mistakes jump out at you.

For some kinds of business writing, the best way to measure its effectiveness is to get other people to try it out. For example, if you are writing a guide to a new software package or setting out a new procedure, getting others to test it out and provide feedback can be invaluable. It’s a particularly good way to spot the kind of assumptions we all make when we know a subject inside out: what’s really obvious to us might not be obvious to somebody else, and their feedback enables us to fill in any gaps that might cause confusion.

Think of it like driving a car. So many of the things you do when driving are completely automatic. You don’t need to remember which pedal to press when you want to brake, or what you need to do to change gear, or where the windscreen wipers are. But when you sat in a car for the first time, you didn’t know any of those things. The same applies to someone who has just joined the department, or who hasn’t encountered a particular system or policy before. Testing and getting feedback helps you to identify any bits that need to go into a little bit more detail.

KEY TAKEAWAYS