Welcome back to Writing for Ministry. This is Lesson 10, Editing, or what I like to  call cut, cut, and then cut some more. I'm not going to review all the earlier steps we took to get where we are, but at this point, you should have a solid first draft  of your work, and you should have gotten feedback on it from a group of people  that you trust.  

Now we're going to ask ourselves, what do we do with this feedback to make  our writing better? How do we know what advice to take and what to ignore?  What do we do when we get advice from two different people that's  contradictory?  

But before we answer that question, we have to ask ourselves another question: How much time and effort should we put into this? It's easy to get caught up in  spending hours and hours crafting and editing and tweaking and trying to make  things just perfect, but if you're crafting a tweet or a post to Facebook, and  you're spending hours doing it, then you may be overdoing it. But if you're  writing an article that's going to be published in a magazine, you are going to  want to put in a little more time. But the good thing is that as you write more, not  only will you write better, but you'll write faster, and you'll develop a sense of  how much time it takes you to write something, and how worth it might be for  you to spend more time on any given project to kind of return on your  investment of time and energy.  

If you're early in your writing career, it might be worth a lot of time for a very little  return, but once you are regularly writing and publishing, and believe me, you  will because I believe in it, your calculation is going to change. But I mention this because it's important to remember: do not shoot off your first draft of your work. Also, strive. Okay, so don't do that, but don't strive for some unattainable  perfection, especially if not many people are going to actually read it.  

Okay, that's we could have we could go on and on about that, but let's let's get  back to the lesson at hand: editing. So you've gotten all this feedback. Now  there are several different ways to edit.  

You can edit for style, which is editing to make sure the tone of the piece  matches the tone of the publication. If the publication has a casual tone, you  want to be writing in a casual tone. If it has almost fun and breezy, then you  want to be fun and breezy.  

Second, there's editing for details. This could be called copy editing. This is  where you look through to make sure your footnotes, your punctuation, your  grammar, your margins, your font, those are all in place. So you can go do a 

whole pass through your work just looking for these things. So these are all  different edits, or or kind of think of them as times you can read through. So the  first one you can read through all for style. The second you're going to read  through just looking for grammar.  

Then there's editing for structure and argument. You know, do the pieces fit  together? Have you done what you said you were going to do? Can you make  your case stronger? Are all the pieces there?  

Then there's narrative editing. Does the structure work? Does is there  movement from the beginning all the way through the piece to the end? So you  could read it just with your eyes trained on that, looking for that. Does is it  believable?  

So I can't cover all those in depth here, but you you think you understand. So  every time you sit down to edit, you're going to say, okay, what am I editing for?  You don't just start at the beginning and read all the way through. You say, okay,  this time I'm going to read it through for punctuation. I'm not going to worry  about the style or structure or the tone of the voice-just punctuation-and then  you set it aside, and you and you then you go through it again, and you look for  style and grammar, or I'm sorry, style or structure. So I'm going to give you a few a few simple steps that you can use to take your solid first draft into a good  second draft, and then your good second draft into a great final draft.  

Step one: walk away and try to get fresh eyes. You sometimes get so close to  your work that you don't see what's going on. Give yourself at least a few days  to forget about the work and then come to it with new eyes. You will be amazed  at the things that you see differently. There will be pieces that you think, "Oh, I  didn't think this was quite that good, but it's actually pretty good. And there will  also be, of course, pieces that you think, "Oh, I thought this was better.  

Step two, outline your work. I like to, whenever I get a piece to edit, the first  thing I do is I think in terms of paragraphs. And if I have a hard copy, I'm going to take a highlighter and I am going to highlight the most important sentence of the  paragraph. If I can't find that important that sentence, then we probably have too many thoughts in a single paragraph. What I like to do is, if if I can find that  sentence, I try to move it to the first sentence of the paragraph, and then  everything under there justifies that sentence, makes the case for that sentence. 

This is what, if you if you remember back back, maybe you're not so distant.  When I was in high school, this is what we call the thesis sentence. Every  paragraph needs to have a thesis sentence. Usually, it's at the beginning, the 

first sentence. Sometimes it's the last sentence. I like to, as my default, make it  the first sentence because I think your writing will be stronger. So that that can  be done in an outline. So you just take that topic sentence, that first sentence of  every paragraph, and maybe if you're working on a computer, I like to black out  the rest, highlight it all, and instead of highlighting it in yellow or red, you  highlight it in black. And you should be able to read through your your argument. If this is a nonfiction piece, read through your argument, and it should still make  sense because you're reading the first sentence of each paragraph.  

Step three, cut. Mark Twain, and I think he stole it from someone else. Said, "I  don't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one. I know, I  know, it's probably taken you a long time. You've poured yourself into this, but  here's the secret: everything gets better when it's shorter, because you know  what you know where the weak points are in your writing, and cut them out and  see what happens. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to cut the. If you need to write again and write some more, the words will be there. You have to trust yourself.  You can cut out the weak points and pour in some better stuff. You can always  add them back in later. Save your drafts, please. Save your drafts. Do it often.  

Step four: read it out loud. You can even read your work to someone. That is a  great practice. You should do it almost every time with everything you read. As  you're reading, you'll notice things. You'll notice rhythms in the writing that you  didn't notice before. Now, I don't think I don't. There's a difference between  

writing for the ear, which is a sermon or a speech, and writing for the eye, which  is an article or a novel or something written. So, being able to navigate those  things is important. But reading even your written work that's not going to be  read orally. Reading it out loud is an excellent practice.  

And step five: mind the details. Sometimes it helps to read your work  backwards, not word by word, but maybe paragraph by paragraph or section by  section. So you're not you're not so worried about how you sound when you're  when you want to be in the details. You want to make sure that you have  commas, paragraphs, question. All your punctuation is set, all your footnotes are are accurately cited, and going backwards through your work just it kind of gives you a different perspective. You don't get so caught up in moving on to the next  section. So that's a great little tip, but mind the details.  

Okay, so here's your assignment for this week: is to follow these steps and edit  your work. Get fresh eyes. Outline your work. Cut maybe 10 to 15 percent. So  you can highlight your document, get the word count, and say, okay, I've got to  

cut off. Where is that 10 percent on? Where's that 15 percent of words? If I have 1000 words, I got to cut out 150 words. What of those words am I going to do? 

And you're going to find it's going to get better. So read it out loud to someone,  and after you've done that, you should have a piece of writing that you can  really, really be proud of. I think you're going to see a difference between the the first draft you did and the second draft. And if you repeat this this process again,  you'll get a really solid third draft.  

You've walked through a process now of writing from beginning to end, I really  appreciate you taking the time to go through the diagram and the mind map and  the brainstorm and the free write and going through all these steps. If you have  followed along and not just whizzed through to get an idea, if you followed  along, you're going to have an excellent piece of writing, and you're going to  have a process, which I hope it's really my genuine hope that you can take this  process and move out into the world and repeat it with other things that you  write, and you get better at it.  

Our next lesson, we're going to shift gears only slightly, and we're going to talk  about publishing our work, and then promoting it to the readership that we want  to reach. Let's write. 



Laatste wijziging: maandag, 19 oktober 2026, 08:31