Editing Guidelines for Editors: Top 9 Tips to Help You Edit Like a Pro

Most of us don’t get it right the first time, which is why we need editors.

If you have never professionally edited before, it may seem easy. I mean, what’s so hard about skimming a nearly-ready document, fixing the occasional missing commas and autocorrect typos? Nothing, it seems. But wait until you realize how important a role editors play, and how crucial editing guidelines for editors are.

Editors are critical to the content creation process. They are tasked with conceptualizing content ideas, fixing errors, inserting or improving CTAs, shaping the direction and tone of the content, optimizing it, and ensuring it aligns with other marketing messages and brand purpose.

With such an important role, editing must be efficient and effective. The editing guidelines below should improve your efficiency and effectiveness, whether you’re editing your content or someone else’s:

1. Find a Quiet Place

You are trying to catch all the mistakes, which requires you to be extra attentive and diligent. It is impossible to be attentive and diligent when around chatty colleagues or loud noises and distractions.

Find a quiet place where you can be silent with your thoughts. Keep your phone on silent or in airplane mode. If you are working on content that will take more than a few hours to complete, consider planning your time to have breaks at least every hour to keep your focus.

You may also need to read it aloud to yourself when you complete the edits, which you can’t do in a noisy room, or a room with other people.

2. Figure Out What Are You Working With

Before you begin the process, take stock of what you’re editing. Is it an SEO blog post? An article? A White Paper? Is it short-from or long-form content?

Understanding what you’re working with helps you understand what to check and expect. The amount of time and the effort you will need to complete an edit depends on the content, so taking stock will give you a general idea you can use to plan the process.

It makes for more effective and efficient content editing than when you jump in blind.

3. Put the Content into Context

Editing doesn’t start by reading the content and jumping into edits. Rather, it starts by confirming the topic aligns with your content strategy.

To ensure it is aligned with the objective, skim the working title, layout, sub-topics, and main ideas covered. Do you think it can achieve the objectives with its target audience?

If you believe the writer missed the mark or the content doesn’t sit right with the objectives, you can send it back for revisions with the instructions attached.

The other part of putting content into context is considering if you have published similar content in the past. If you have, you need to ensure the new submission adds something new, or else it could ruin your SEO strategy if search engines consider it duplicate content.

4. Read the Content Without Making Edits

Reading through the entire thing without making edits seems like wasting time by adding unnecessary steps to the process, but trust me, it ends up saving more time and effort.

You must read through the content from start to end to understand what needs work and what’s written. Reading it whole allows you to reflect on it as a whole, so you accurately determine where it needs corrections and improvements.

It’ll be a shame and a waste of time if you start making edits and then realize that the content may need a complete overhaul.

Reading it first while taking notes of edits required makes clear whether the content needs too much editing help that requires to be sent back to the writer or just enough editing help that you can handle.

5. Prioritize Editing Tasks

Editing could involve much work and too many tasks, especially if the writer missed the mark. It can be overwhelming and lead to anxiety, stress, and procrastination. This combination, obviously, results in poorly-done edits.

To deal with the many editing tasks, rank them in order of importance and urgency so you can handle the critical tasks first. But how do you rank them?

Are you familiar with the Eisenhower Decision Matrix from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People?

After the first read, you will have at least a rough draft of the editing tasks you need to handle. Group them into the four categories above. The most critical actions that require immediate attention fall under “Do”, and tasks that are not so important but require immediate attention fall under “Delegate”.

“Decide” is for tasks that are not urgent but important, and “Eliminate” tasks are neither urgent nor important.

Prioritizing editing tasks will improve your productivity and editing efficiency.

6. Check for Missing Blanks

Apart from checking for mistakes, identify any missing blanks and improvements you would like added as you are reading. Some of them include:

• Missing sources, links, or citations
• Points that need more explanation or evidence
• Critical information missing from an explanation
• Structural inconsistencies, such as a section missing an image while all the others have one.

Take notes of all these blanks in bullet point form, review them, and include them in the edit instructions when resending the piece to the author for revisions.

7. Read the Post Out Loud

Remember when we said you need to find a quiet place to make edits? This is why.

Reading the post out loud to yourself will help you identify errors like clumsy sentences that you need to hear out loud to detect. As you read, mark anything that sounds confusing, misleading, or repetitious. It is nearly impossible to miss an error when reading sentences out loud.

8. Include Positive Feedback in the Edit Requests

When requesting the edits, remember to include positive feedback in the instructions, not just what they should do. What did you like about the content? What are its strong aspects? Positive feedback is just as helpful as constructive feedback.

Simple comments like “This is great!” and “I love how you explained this part” take a few seconds to write but can significantly impact how the author handles the edits. They balance your constructive comments and make the writer excited about starting the edits. Also, when they know the parts you like, they will keep doing them the same way.

9. Know When to Move on

Don’t be that clingy ex; move on.

There is always something more you could do: a section added, an explanation expounded, a structure tweaked. But while perfectionism is a good thing in some situations, it can also mess with productivity.

A helpful way to determine whether the content is good enough, even if you feel more can be done, is to ask yourself the following questions.

• Does it solve the problem, convey the message, or address the need as required?
• Is it in line with the brand?
• Is the writing of high quality?
• Has someone else reviewed it?

Answering these questions will ensure you move on after making the critical edits and improvements.

Efficient editing takes a step-by-step approach. You find a quiet place to avoid distractions, take stock of the content, put it into context, read it first for a holistic approach, and then prioritize the tasks to ensure you handle them all effectively. 

Hire Professional Writers for High-Quality Content

Every editing job is as good as the writer who produced it. Fixing errors consumes time, so if a piece of content is really bad, it’s usually more efficient to start over than to try and fix the original. 

To save their precious time, editors need to work with the best writers who can deliver good content that doesn’t require an overwhelming number of edits. Otherwise, it makes an editor’s jobs exceedingly difficult.

If you need high-quality writers to create content that doesn’t need edits, Zoey Writers can help you. Our team comprises professional writers experienced in creating all content types. 
 

Some of our writers are “generalists,” which means that they are excellent at adapting to different content writing types. Our other writers are “specialists” who have established expertise in certain niches. 

Whatever your content needs are, we have the right experts to handle your project to ensure that you’ll meet your marketing goals. Moreover, you can be assured that you’ll get high-quality content that will need no editing or very minimal editing, if any.

Contact us today to discuss your project or to find out more about our content writing services.  

Also check out: 8 Types of Edits That Make You a Copy Ninja

Photo by Caio. Thank you Caio!