Mike Hannay en J. Lachlan Mackenzie - Effective Writing in English

Part 1 The process of writing

The purpose of editing, then, is to check and revise a pre-final text in such a way that the chances of misunderstanding are minimized. Many inexperi enced writers, even those who accept the necessity of editing, find this a very difficult thing to do. You may well feel that hacking away at the text you have laboured over is almost like cutting into your own flesh. If you are the kind of writer who waits for inspiration and then pours out their thoughts in one eruption, then you are likely to resist the suggestion that each word and every turn of phrase in your text should be weighed and tested against other possi ble formulations. Spontaneous writing often produces fluent, dynamic text, but the danger is that you will be writing primarily to satisfy your own urge to create rather than to communicate your ideas to another person. Your text may end up only pleasing you while remaining impenetrable for your readers. Hence our recommendation, no matter what your personal style of writing, to reserve sufficient time and energy for editing, even if you feel the text you have written is a perfect expression of your thoughts and feelings. It has often been said that there are (at the extremes) two kinds of writers: the Mozarts and the Beethovens. Mozart was reputed never to alter a single note that he committed to paper, whereas Beethoven is said to have agonized over every phrase, filling countless notebooks with musical experiments before pronouncing a work completed. Be this as it may, taking Mozart as your model does not exonerate you from being self-critical. We pointed out above that the three processes of planning, writing proper and editing need not follow one another in time. What Mozart was able to achieve was a fusion of the three processes in time. As the formal perfection of his compositions shows, he did not avoid the artistic and communicative responsibility of self-critical reflection on his work, even as he produced it. Editing involves reviewing your own work at various levels. Each of these lev els is treated in detail in this book; indeed, the whole book can be regarded as a vade mecum for the self-editor, especially the last part, Getting the details right, and the checklist in Chapter 15. Our suggestion is that you edit your text separately at each level, starting at Level 1. As you grow more experi enced in editing, you may be able to edit for two levels, and ultimately for all three at one pass. The levels correspond roughly with what is dealt with in the successive chapters of this book: Level 1 (cf. Chapters 3 to 5) The macro-level: ■■ checking that the entire text is well-structured and corresponds with its stated aim; Three levels of editing

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