One ­— perhaps unexpected — advantage of working with an editor is that it can help you become a more effective editor of your own work. Having an outside perspective on your writing can help you notice not just individual issues, but also patterns. This can lead to identifying what I call “representative errors,” errors that are representative of particular tendencies or habits in your writing. Recognizing and then working on these can improve both your writing and your thinking.

Writing is not a place where perfection is desirable, simply because it is not attainable: what would a “perfect” piece of writing even look like? In other words, we all have issues when we write, and especially as we are working through our ideas in writing. As I have said elsewhere, I believe that the process of revision (editing and proofreading) is not about making a piece of writing perfect, but rather about identifying and addressing errors and issues that keep the writing from communicating its message. An added bonus is that this process can also help to identify what kinds of errors and issues tend to occur and reoccur (those “representative errors” I mentioned above) and, far more importantly, it can help you start to see why those errors are happening.

As I mentioned, everyone makes mistakes when they write. My most notable “representative errors” are that I produce fused sentences and I both over- and misuse conjunctive adverbs. I began to identify these errors over the course of the major writing projects I did for my postgraduate degrees. While I was writing my MA thesis, my supervisor noted my somewhat profligate use of “however.” As a result, I got into the habit of finding-and-replacing that particular word. Over time, I began to notice that “indeed” was slowly creeping in to fill the void left by all those “howevers.” So, I would simply find-and-replace that word instead. It turns out, though, that those individual words were only symptoms. I wasn’t able to accurately diagnose the underlying condition until I was writing my PhD dissertation. As I was re-reading my chapter drafts, I noticed that I had created a lot of fused sentences. Fused sentences indicate a lack of clarity about the relationship between ideas: in them, two ideas are simply jammed together, with nothing to either properly join or separate them. Conjunctive adverbs, similarly, can give a general idea of the relationship between ideas, but they do not set clear boundaries. This is why they cannot be used to join two independent clauses: doing so creates either a fused sentence or a comma splice, depending on the punctuation.

Slowly, I came to realize that my conjunctive adverbs and fused sentences were telling me the same thing: I didn’t know how my ideas related to each other. This is especially difficult in a long, complex document like a dissertation. Once I realized this, I became more aware not just of individual occurrences of either fused sentences or conjunctive adverbs, but also of how one idea related to the next, and the one after that. I was no longer just finding-and-replacing but finding and rewriting. Noting and recognizing individuals errors I was making ultimately led to greater clarity in my overall thinking about the message I was trying to convey with my project.

If you are interested in exploring what working with an editor can do for your writing, contact me today.