The Editing Order That Saves the Most Time
Most people edit by starting at the top and reading through, fixing whatever they notice. This is the slowest possible method, because it mixes decisions of completely different sizes.
Polishing a sentence in a section you will cut is wasted work — and worse, having polished it, you are now reluctant to cut it.
Largest to smallest
1. Purpose. Before reading a word: what is this for, who reads it, what should they do afterwards? A document that fails here cannot be rescued by editing.
2. Structure. Read only the headings and the first sentence of each paragraph. Is the order right? Is anything missing? Is anything here that does not belong? This is where the big cuts happen, and they should happen before anything else is touched.
3. Paragraphs. Does each one make a single point, and does its first sentence announce that point? See paragraph length.
4. Sentences. Length variation, clarity, buried verbs. This is where most of the improvement lives once the structure is settled.
5. Words. Cut the padding, replace the vague ones, remove the intensifiers.
6. Proofreading. Typos, punctuation, names and numbers. Last, always — and see our guide to proofreading your own writing.
Why the order matters
Each level makes the next one cheaper. Fix the structure and half the awkward sentences disappear, because they were awkward transitions between paragraphs that should not have been adjacent.
The reverse order is what most people do, and it means polishing prose that is about to be reorganised.
The hardest part
Cutting things you like.
The standard advice is to kill your darlings, which is memorable and unhelpfully absolute. The useful version: if a passage is the best thing in the document but does not serve its purpose, it belongs in a different document.
Cut it into a separate file rather than deleting it. That makes the cut psychologically survivable, which is the actual obstacle.
When to stop
Editing has diminishing returns and no natural end. Two signals that you are finished:
- You are changing things back. If a word has been swapped twice and returned to the original, the sentence is done.
- You are editing for you, not the reader. Ask whether the change makes anything clearer for someone else. If it only satisfies you, stop.
Most documents are finished well before their writers accept it, and a few more hours of polishing is usually the least valuable work available.
Checked against Merriam-Webster, the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. Spotted an error? Tell us — see our editorial policy.
