And Then You Edit

So you've written a paper. Phew.

You diligently carved out time every day to sit down and pen a few lines of prose. You paced the floor, you muttered to yourself, you bounced ideas off your colleagues, you did your best to manipulate Microsoft Word into doing your bidding. But before you submit the paper, before you hand it over to someone else to read, you've got to edit it yourself.

After I finished writing my thesis for my masters I was exhausted. Hours were spent hunched over my keyboard pecking away. Candles were burned at both ends. Cliches were tossed about. But read my own thesis?

"I know my thesis like the back of my hand! Why would I need to read it?"

Well...I tend to write like I talk. I think most people do this, it's fairly common in the age of social media/internet. Unfortunately, the writing-like-you-talk style of writing is not ideal when it comes to things like papers for publication...or my thesis. So of course I needed to read my thesis but I honestly didn't do that great of a job reading through it. It's tough to read your own work when you feel like you have it all memorized.

When I saw this article on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website about editing yourself I was psyched. "Perhaps I can find some tips for the paper I'm having a tough time crafting," I thought. And I did but not as many as I had hoped for. The two main tips from the article are in italics below, emphasis mine.

All I can do is urge [you] to pay attention to well-written works in [your] own field, to read not just for content, but also for the nuances of style, and to steal the tools and tricks that good writers use.

I recently read a great journal article about microbial desalination cells whose text seems to follow such a logical manner I can't help but admire it. I could probably do something similar for my topic.

If you don't remember the basics—like what a semicolon does—you might want to remind yourself. If you don't know the difference between further and farther, lay and lie, figure it out (or go lie down until you do). If you are prone to comma splices (as I am), be aware of that and make conscientious choices. Those are not trivial issues. If we don't take the form seriously, the content of the message won't get delivered. There's no point in writing if you're not going to be understood.

Over the weekend I reviewed a paper that was full of mistakes. On one hand the writer of that paper was an English as a second language person and an undergraduate student. I'm not saying that ESL or undergraduate students don't know how to write, I'm saying that I think it's harder to write a paper in that situation. On the other hand a lot of the mistakes were formatting ones (e.g. "Figure 1.title of figure here" vs "Figure 2. The blah blah shows blah.") which I would consider mistakes that anyone could catch regardless of language or years in school.

I've been using Guide to Technical Editing: Discussion, Dictionary, and Exercises as my go-to style guide but that's simply because it was the book that the "Writing and Editing for Technical Publishing" class I took last year used. This article recommends The Elements of Style (4th Edition) plus Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing), and a four-and-a-half star Amazon rating can't be too far off. The article goes on to name other reference books for writing and editing such as Economical Writing, Second Edition and On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft.

These five books aren't the only ones out there. Are there any must-have style guides that you use?