So. I am prone to proofreading my own words A LOT. I read what I type over and over and over and over… You get the idea. It’s both a blessing and a curse. Perhaps because I am so geared toward the minutiae of my own writing, I tend to be hyper-focused on all writing, whether it’s a blog I’m reading, a CNN article, a book, an email from a counterpart… All of them. As a result, this has kind of become a big part of my professional career. And don’t get me wrong, I love it. Wouldn’t have it any other way, even as I’m metaphorically beating myself about the head with a baseball bat because I’m unsure how to greet someone in an email. (Can we bring back ‘Good day’? Please?)
I don’t take issue with my nature; I appreciate the attention to detail that it has cultivated within me. The thing is, I want this for other people, too. I’m always happy to proofread an email or report or something for someone else, but I also want to do whatever I can to hone their own focus so they see things the same way I do. At first blush, that sounds arrogant and crappy, but what I mean is: I want to figure out a way to make what’s obvious to me obvious to everyone. I want us ALL to see it. Maybe it would put me out of a job, but hey, I like change. Sometimes.
So, how do we make this happen? Do I have an ironclad process that I use for editing? No, and there’s the rub. I feel like I’m sort of all over the place when I edit. My eyes bounce around the draft like a pinball. I’m not sure how to clearly describe how I edit. It isn’t a conscious thing, usually. Most of the guides out there will tell you to focus on one thing at a time, whether it’s content, grammar, spelling, brevity, and what have you. But I can’t do that. If I see a typo or a punctuation issue, HAVE TO FIX IT NOW. WAIT? WAIT?! WHAT A PREPOSTEROUS IDEA! HOW DARE YOU! NEVER SPEAK TO ME OR MY FORTY THOUSAND EMAILS EVER AGAIN. (The funny part of this is that my main email inbox is sitting at over 86,000 unread emails right now. Don’t emulate me in the inbox department. It is a chaotic and unlovely road to go down.) Sure, I might TRY to stick to one issue at a time, but it never works for me. My process is wholly mine. We just have to help one another figure out what works best for each of us. Therefore, we’re going to talk OPTIONS.
Read It Aloud for the Class
Super cereal right now. If you read your writing OUT LOUD you will catch issues with it. The fact of the matter is that our brains are trained to fill in gaps and skip ahead. This becomes a whole lot harder to do when you’re actually reading something aloud. Don’t believe me? Have you ever read any Tolkien aloud to one of your kids? Love him to death, but JRRT’s wording is HARD to SAY for some reason. Gotta be something to do with the diction. So, read aloud and you’ll notice more. It doesn’t have to be a shout; you can whisper it to yourself, or, heck, pick up your phone and pretend you’re reading it to someone on the line! Then no one will think you’re sitting at your desk randomly talking to yourself. (Believe me, I’m the last person to judge. Be yourself.)
Change the Typeface
(I just changed the color. I don’t know how to change the typeface in here. I’m giving you guys all I’ve got, ok?) I saw a post where someone claimed that if you were having writers block that you should change your typeface to Comic Sans and the words would just flow out like a mountain stream. Lots of people angrily corroborated the story, probably because everyone who isn’t a 2nd grade teacher (wait, they probably hate it even more than the rest of us) hates Comic Sans with a passion, but anyway, lots of people claimed it did the trick. So, if this works for writing, it could also work for reading. Make a major change to your typeface; odds are you’ll see a lot more than you did with good old Times New Roman.
Change the View
Sort of in line with the aforementioned, you can also change the way you’re actually viewing the material–meaning, PRINT it out. Sometimes looking at something on paper rather than on a screen helps us to focus differently. I’m all about saving trees, so try the Comic Sans trick first and see if that helps, but needs must. Back in the day, I used to write all my reports by hand before I typed them up on the computer; I guess that was kind of an inverse version of this idea. Sometimes all it takes is a small shift in your visuals for things to stand out.
First Things First
Somewhere along the way in elementary school, I remember one of my teachers telling us to underline the first word of each of our sentences in a paragraph. I will admit: at this stage in the game, I don’t underline them anymore. I just make it a point to look at them all. So, take a look at what you’ve written. Are you consistently using the same couple of words to start each sentence? Yeah? Then try switching it up. Move away from any ‘back-and-forth’ conversation language such as ‘He said [blah]. She responded [blerg].‘ If you’ve clearly established who someone is, maybe you can switch to a pronoun (he/she/they) every now and again, as long as it doesn’t make the meaning unclear. This is also an easy way to see if your sentences are all written in the same format. All short, basic statements? These get boring and repetitive to read. All long and wordy? No bueno, unless you’re writing for academia (lolz). Try using some dependent clauses to start things off. The point is, evaluating the first word in each sentence is an easy way to get an objective look at your writing and make changes to improve the flow, clarity, cadence (prosody), and/or interest of the piece. Here, we’ll do an example together:
Mary once set aside some time to take up a new hobby. Tired of milking cows all day every day, she opted to pursue the delicate art of pointillism. She realized that it was a somewhat specialized skill but still wanted to give it a try. So, Mary signed up for an art class at her local community college and bought herself some blank canvases. As it turns out, Mary was quite gifted in the pointillist technique; however, the only things she ever painted were cows. Apparently, deep down inside, she missed her herd.
So, if we look at that passage, we can see the general shape/style of our sentences relatively easily with each first word underlined.
First sentence: Mary once set aside some time to take up a new hobby. Short and basic.
Second sentence: Tired of milking cows all day every day, she opted to pursue the delicate art of pointillism. A little different, starting with a dependent clause as you can see, my first instinct was to call this a dependent clause, but I knew that wasn’t right because it doesn’t carry any clear subject/verb setup. So, this appears to start with a participle phrase behaving as an adjective. It kind of makes sense if you rearrange the sentence and squint at it a bit (i.e. She was [tired of milking cows all day every day].) You could replace the bracketed phrase with another adjective, like ‘ugly,’ ‘thirsty,’ and so on. So it’s just a rather large adjective. (Thank goodness we don’t have to know what things are called to use them, right? I’m terrible with grammar terminology. The words do the thing and it makes sense. That’s all we need, really. I don’t need to understand the laws of physics to abide by them. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with an idea championed by linguist Noam Chomsky: Universal Grammar, or the idea that we as humans are born with an inherent understanding of how to communicate verbally.) Anywho, sidebar done. Moving on.
Third sentence: She realized that it was a somewhat specialized skill but still wanted to give it a try. Fairly basic sentence. Compound predicate. Nothing flashy, but with a bit of length.
Fourth sentence: So, Mary signed up for an art class at her local community college and bought herself some blank canvases. This sentence begins with a coordinating conjunction (‘so’–remember our FANBOYS?–the page that links to looks rather rigid and un-fun, but informative. This entry from our trusty Grammar Girl discusses FANBOYS and why that little memory device might be misleading. (GASP!)) and again has the compound predicate thing going. ‘She [action] and [action].’
Fifth sentence: As it turns out, Mary was quite gifted in the pointillist technique; however, the only things she ever painted were cows. This sentence throws in a nice little bit of complexity with the semicolon used between two independent clauses. A bit more involved, but not over the top.
Sixth sentence: Apparently, deep down inside, she missed her herd. This one starts with an adverb (apparently) and then has a bracketed ‘interrupter‘ (deep down inside) before we get to the meat of the sentence, which is just a simple ‘she missed her herd.’ The rest of it we’ll call window dressing (or flair, if you’ve ever seen the movie Office Space).
So, now that we’ve walked through an example, do you think that looking at the individual sentences, or at least their first words, is a beneficial practice? Yes? No? I’m all ears (or, in this case, eyes). I’m going to call it a day on this post for now. I’m trying to walk a fine line between being both informative and brief. I realize I’m sort of failing on the ‘brief’ part, but I hope they’re at least informative. I’m sure I’ll be back with more posts on editing, since it is so near and dear to my neuroses heart.
-hxrg
Decalcify Your Brain 