Learning how to reedit your work after improving your writing skills can be difficult. I never thought that I would find articles that I had written years ago not up to my standards. After publishing hundreds of articles during that time I was quite pleased with my typical work. However, recently I came across a year and a half old unpublished article for a website of mine. I thought I would go ahead and publish it here. However, when I was proofreading it I noticed that it was not up to par of what my work had become. What I might have not been aware of before was now staring me in the face. I just could not bring myself to publish the piece as is. I did not mind the idea of editing, until I started to actually edit it. At this point I realized that editing your old work, which might be verbose, feels like you are butchering the writing and that you are throwing away essential hard work. Well I finally edited that piece and during the process I learned a lot of helpful tips for approaching old writing pieces with an objective eye.
As a reader I have never cared for verbose material and while I cannot say that I have written in the absolute most concise possible way for everything that I have shared in my writing, I can say that I make a point to get to the point. That was the first thing that I noticed about this older piece of writing, I was not getting to the point. It occurred to me that this must be what my English teacher was always talking about when she accused students of writing the rough draft of their papers before completing the outline. An outline was always part of the assignment required, but many classmates ignored that. I actually always enjoyed writing outlines in school and not only found them beneficial tools for writing essays but also in every other kind of writing I found myself taking part in. I find myself utilizing the concept of an outline to manage tasks at work, with planning my son’s school assignments and many other aspects of life. Still, it did not appear that I had made any outline when I wrote this piece. My first tip is simple. If you find that your piece is not concise or all over the place, then make an outline of what you would expect from that kind of writing piece.
Writing the outline for the piece was simple. In fact it actually made me think of a number of important things that I could mention in the piece. Things that had not occurred to me to include in the original draft. What was hard was that I had to address the fact that what I had written did not match the ideal draft and that meant it would take time and effort to transform the original piece to fit the outline. I think it would have been much easier to just rewrite the piece from scratch, because when you have to remove something from a piece it can be difficult convincing yourself that doing so is the right thing. Why? Well because it is difficult to be objective of the time and effort that you put into the original piece. So tip number two is just as simple, but harder to initially accomplish. Just let go of what you put into the original piece of writing. If you cannot let go of the “bad” hard work that you put in, you will never be able to put in the “good” hard work that you need to fix it.
Once you let go of the fact that you are deleting something that you put time into you can just keep the good. To begin this process save a copy of the original, this way you can reference it if you feel you might have forgotten something important. It is also good to keep a copy if you are doubting that a new piece will be better because you can remind yourself of what was wrong in the original piece. Next, simply begin crossing out anything that unnecessarily repeats itself. Also cross out anything that is irrelevant. Then move sentences into the most coherent order and add anything new in from the outline that the original lacked. Reread the piece from start to finish, and adjust any sentences and paragraphs so that things flow easily. Lastly, treat the piece like you would any piece in the final editing stages. This is what I did and so glad I did. The new draft is something I can feel good about. Readers can enjoy it more and the process of reediting improved my writing skills even more. Keep in mind though that If something is not working no matter how you edit it, it may be time to move on to another topic and to scrap the writing piece all together. I have done that as well and am very glad that I did.