The Importance of Editing

by Doug Lewars

If you want to become a better writer, become a better editor.

If you want to become a better editor, edit work that is not your own.

I recently joined a local writers’ group and was requested to comment on various extracts from group members completed and in-progress work. I quickly found a number of recommendations I could make for improvement, but what came as a bit of a surprise, was when I went back and started editing some of my own work, I found exactly the same things there. One common mistake is using names too frequently when a pronoun would suffice.