Joel Falconer -

I’m not doing a whole lot of editing at Envato right now, but I’m thinking about it a lot. Not long ago, we hired some site editors for the blogs I’m responsible for so that I could focus more on growing readerships and revenue, and of course, focus on finding new ways for these sites to help people liberate themselves from careers they don’t enjoy and make something out of their dreams (it’s what we do).

The people we hired are talented, but there’s still a process of imparting knowledge. It’s important to understand that at Envato we generally hire people who are experienced with social media and good at the language to edit sites, rather than people who are experienced with traditional editing and good with social media. Only one of the new editors is like me in that they were editing content for money before coming on board.

The reason I’ve been thinking about editing a lot recently is not because these guys are doing anything less than an amazing job. It’s the act of passing on that part of the job that’s been prompting me to ask myself how I’d go about training someone who had a harder time taking to the role because they haven’t been writing or editing for years.

So when you see something about editing on this site, it’s exactly what I’d tell someone who is learning about the craft itself for the first time, beyond the basics that are too often lacking among members of modern society (I mean, we shouldn’t need editors to tell you what to capitalize and where to put that apostrophe, right?).

These are my thoughts on approaching an edit. There are editors at each extreme–those who will go in hacking and slashing, and those who will make minimal changes after extensive re-reading and consideration. I like to think of my own as approach as one that respects the author and the audience. I give the piece proper consideration and make sure I understand it before I touch it, but after that, any change to improve the way that information is communicated is fair game.

My own editorial process developed when I first started editing in earnest several years ago for a publication aimed at creative artists.

It’s important to realize that “nuts and bolts” editing is just one part of the edit, and that, when looking at the piece as a whole, you’re not really looking at technical inaccuracies. An edit must be informed by knowledge of the piece and the author’s intentions, and each change made to advance the work as a whole–its readability and ability to clearly convey concepts that the author may have had difficulty in articulating without the editor’s assistance.

In a rushed world, editors often have to give less attention to a piece than they’d like and to focus instead on the volume of their output to meet quotas. Any process can be adapted to fit the constraints of the situation if you understand the philosophy. The philosophy behind my process is this: understanding the piece in its context is essential to being able to make informed edits on either the minor details within it or something as big as the structure itself, so that your changes don’t change the intended meaning of the piece. Clarify and bring the meaning out, yes, but your job as editor is not to change it.

My preferred method is a multi-pass approach:

1. Read the piece as a consumer. No pen in hand. Never begin editing any part of the piece before you find out where it’s going.
2. Read it again, this time with a pen or highlighter to make note of things you’d like to come back to later. At this point you should be reading as an editor, though not really editing yet–just bookmarking things to be looked at again.
3. Perform a structural edit. At this stage, you’re focusing on making the piece readable and perfecting its flow. This can mean re-writing sentences, moving paragraphs around, and all sorts of cut-and-pasting. The biggest changes you make all occur in this pass.
4. At this point you should ensure the language of the piece is technically sound. I recommend doing this “nuts and bolts” edit after your structural edits because so much can be accidentally changed while you’re moving entire sentences and paragraphs around.
5. Preview in place. Change the medium. If you’ve been writing in Notepad, put the article in WordPress and preview it so you can see what the work looks like in the medium it will end up in. Often just changing the medium on your final review of the work opens your eyes to a whole bunch of things you didn’t see previously.

It’s a fairly simple process, but it does take a bit of time to complete it. With the amount of content I had on my desk each day from three different sites at any given time, along with a multitude of other duties to perform, I didn’t always get to follow it as written, but it’s a good foundation.

The most important skill an editor needs to develop is not an advanced technical knowledge of the language (although it is important). That skill is being able to identify the mental ‘snags’ in the work. These are the places you are most likely to lose an impatient reader to another tab in their browser.

Which passages trip the reader? I’m sure you know what I’m talking about–when you have to re-read a seemingly fine sentence repeatedly until you comprehend it and move on, or a sentence just ‘feels’ wrong, throwing you out of the natural flow and making it that much harder to get back into reading. While this all sounds somewhat unquantifiable and fluffy, from a business perspective this is the editor’s most important function–ensuring that the copy itself is not causing readers to go elsewhere. Instead, it should be compelling, keeping the reader on the page and sending them to explore other pages of your site or publication.

To pick out bad wording that is technically correct you need to take off the editor’s hat and read the piece in a very passive way. If you’re thinking like an editor and looking for mistakes, you may miss subtle things that you’d only notice if you were only paying attention to the ease with which you can read the piece passively. Note where there are mental snags with a highlighter or some other tool that doesn’t require you to stop for long or break flow. What you’re looking for can be almost imperceptible or it can be a serious fault in the wording, and both extremes deserved to be fixed. There’s no nit-picking in editing. The difference between that great magazine story you can’t put down and something you have to force yourself through is often simply a dedicated editor who removes every obstacle to the process of reading.

This is where the work of real editing lies. If you know how to hire writers, you shouldn’t have to spend much time fixing apostrophes and odd plurals–that’d be like a hospital having a team of surgeons who don’t know how to insert a drip. Your job isn’t to fix a bad piece; it’s to take good work and elevate it to greatness.

How do you approach editing? Whether you simply need to get your blog posts in good shape before publishing them or you edit other people’s content for a living, I’m curious to know.