Edit purposefully
If you just read through your writing and expect it to tell you about its problems--its lack of clarity, its needless complexity, its delaying organization--you'll never do much of use to the writing. You'll make this or that change as it occurs to you, but have little idea that you've used your editing time profitably.
Some writers tell me that the most irritating part of editing or reconsidering is that they never know when they're done, when they've done enough. The answer to the implied question of 'How do I know when I'm done?' is unpleasant. As a writer, you'll never know. As a business writer, which is to say, as a writer under the pressure of time, you'll know only how much time you have. So use that. Decide beforehand how much time will go into the writing and how much into the reconsidering. If you have no idea of what percentages to use, start at about 50-50 and let your experience be your guide thereafter. In my own work, I estimate that the writing will take about 30% of the time and the reconsidering about 70%, but I write fast and, of course, am probably overzealous about reconsidering for readers' needs.
After reorganizing and smoothing, which generally take very little time, you should decide to look for some particular, something not related to meaning at all, something that will incline you to make change and then check the results. The most powerful of these has already been covered: organization.
Focus points for purposeful editing include ideas like these:
- Change half the passive-voice verbs on each page to active voice.
- Make two 'being' verbs per page more concrete.
- Check all 'which,' 'who,' and 'that' joinings for placement of modifiers and for wordiness.
- Check all series, bullets, or 'and' joinings for parallelism and subordination.
- Reexamine the sentence flows for normal sentence structures, periodic structures, and balanced structures.
- Check for 'the (noun) of' phrases.
- Look for opportunities to use parallel form: those places where you are dealing with like ideas, but not expressing them in a similar form, order, and wording.
- On each page, find two uses of vague jargon or of needless technical jargon and simplify.
- Check each page for complex sentences flows, those with parentheses or other delays of meaning in the beginnings or middles of the sentences. Change the flow so that complication comes at the end.
Smaller level checks might include these:
- Check every 'not' and try to remove it.
- Check every intensifier or qualifier and make your vocabulary more precise.
- Check for general-action verbs.
- Check throughout the document for phrases of timing.
- Check for overlong sentences and either break them down or
find a way to use a colon correctly.
==>Guidelines==>Process==>Reconsideration