Editing vs Writing

There's something so productive about writing - you type and see the words emerge on the page. You can watch a word count grow (like on my dissertation meter). You feel like you're moving forward, even if it's just a paragraph a day.

Editing is another beast altogether. It doesn't feel as progressive because it involves working with material you've already worked with. Sometimes that's tough.

The post-writing editing, you know where you go over the section you've just written, or the paper you've finished, or the chapter you've completed, and edit for clarity and conciseness, flow, paragraph formation, eliminating awkward phrasing, reconstructing sentences and proofreading isn't hard. Perhaps because it takes place right after the writing, it seems easier. Perhaps it's because you know what changes need to be made.

Integrating someone else's suggestions is harder. Necessary, because their distance from the project means their comments are invaluable, but harder. Part of it sometimes is deciphering their handwriting, or your notes from a meeting (this one's particularly hard for me). But sometimes an editing note can be clear, as in "this doesn't work," but figuring out how to fix it is hard. That of course is the tough part.

For the next several weeks I figure the only thing I'll be doing is editing. On top of the fact that my online work is all editing right now, by the time I returned home last week, I had feedback on four different dissertation chapters. Editing four chapters at a time will require a lot of work. Then three days later, I got an email about the book chapter I submitted. As I mentioned earlier, not only do I have to change the formatting from MLA to Chicago style, but I have to cut almost a third of the paper.

That cutting is painful. I've been working on it for three days, and at the end of each of those days, I've only cut a small fraction of what I need to, but I throw up my hands in the air and declare "I cannot cut anything else from this paper without seriously damaging the argument!"

Funny thing is, the next day I sit down again and find another little piece that can be trimmed. So maybe I can make it down to the necessary page count. Then again, each day, the amount I cut seems to get smaller and smaller. And I worry that once I look at what's left, the argument will indeed be damaged.

My hope lies in a banner on my computer that reads "manage reader expectations" which I think of as the mantra for writing. (Of course managing reader expectations means you need to know those expectations, which has been a major problem with the dissertation project, but that's another blog post.) But I'm discovering that managing reader expectations applies to editing too.

As I re-read every sentence in that paper, sometimes multiple times, I find myself asking if the reader wants or expects this sentence, phrase, or even word. It seems to help me focus, and all I can do is hope that by the time I whittle it down to the prescribed page count, that focus will keep the argument intact. I find that phrasing it in terms of whether the reader wants it there (not me, because I want everything to stay - all my words are precious!) also helps me cut what I spent so much time writing.

Keep your fingers crossed for me that I can reach page count!