3 ms·
Editing means writing more—it just means publishing less. Instead of writing 1000 words, you write 1500 and delete 1000 of them.
by bccdee 4y ago
Editing means writing more—it just means publishing less. Instead of writing 1000 words, you write 1500 and delete 1000 of them.
- ghaff 4y agoI agree to an extent--mostly upfront "throat clearing" and sometimes there's a section that just doesn't fit or becomes tangential as a piece develops. But for day to day writing, which I do a lot of, the 1200 words or so I put down is mostly going to get little nips and tucks rather than a lot of wholesale cuts. YMMV of course.
- bccdee 4y agoYeah I'm exaggerating a bit to prove a point, but even so, each nip and tuck is an new sentence fragment written and an old sentence fragment discarded. The more you edit, the smaller the ratio of what you publish to what you wrote.
- ghaff 4y agoFair enough. But I do this sort of thing all the time and--assuming I have a clear topic in mind and the supporting material (big caveats which can take quite a bit of time)--banging out a thousand word article is certainly less than a day process. And, yes, while a fair number of words change or change positions or get reworded, that sort of essentially copy-editing is mostly stuff I can do in my sleep.