Editing is Divine: It Makes Your Writing Come Alive

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Editing is divine! An editor can take an okay piece of work and make it excellent. When crafting a piece of content for thought leadership or SEO, you want to begin with intent. Even in a piece of content where SEO doesn’t matter, keywords aren’t as important, but intent still is. So, the first question to ask is “Why does this piece of content exist? What’s the point of this content?”

Not every piece of content needs to exist, or at least not right now.

A good way to go about framing your writing is to answer the questions about what you want the reader to think, feel, and do. Resonance matters more than anything.

What are the types of editing?

When it comes to editing for SEO or content marketing there are three types:

· Developmental or structural

· Copy edits

· Proofreading

Different editors have different processes or styles. But all agree that editing is in stages.

Developmental Editing

The main idea is to consider what context we want to provide upfront. What’s the most important context to start with? Then, what’s the core of the content? Are we focusing on tactics, or is it more conceptual? Are we trying to make them think more or be thought leaders? So, we have conceptual, strategic, and tactical layers to consider.

This is all part of the developmental stage. We’re not even touching the keyboard yet; we’re just reading. At this point, editors could leave comments or questions like, “Is there a reason why this should go here? Maybe it would fit better there?” This is the fun, collaborative thinking part.

Copy editing is about eliminating unnecessary jargon. As you often see on social media, if you can say something in one word instead of ten, you probably should. You’ll want to write for a lower sentence-level readability to make it skimmable.

That’s my process. It’s interesting to hear similar processes but approached from different angles. It’s fascinating to see the same concepts being applied in various ways. This is a pretty iterative process with multiple steps involved.