Peer Editing: Making Sense of Each Other’s Notes
Editing is always a part in writing. It really has a major and risky role in shaping your content.
In order to make your content worth reading, you need to get rid of the unnecessary words or lines in your content. After writing the first draft, editing your work always follows. Since you are going to revise and proofread your own work for perfection, still, there is a feeling that you can’t fully rely to your own judgments.
Since it is your writing, you can immediately determine any bad writings and correct it all soon as you can. However, your own editing is only limited to your own way of correcting your work. It will be best to have someone who is also good in proofreading and revising your work.
A person or two, depending on your need to edit your work, is applicable since every person has their own unique way of thinking.
What’s the importance of having a peer editing? Aside from the fact that each one of you can double check your writing for effectiveness, this also allows your own perspective about the topic to be explained clearly to someone else by the time they first read your work.
It may depend upon how your topic influences your readers. There are topics where everyone knows it well and there are topics that only a few understands. But in your part as a writer, after reviewing your topic more, you now have different points of view out of it but how can you write a piece where your readers can briefly understand what you ought to say in your writing?
To avoid any confusions and bad impressions due to bad writing, peer editing is just the best solution to judge your work effectively.
Ever heard of peer editing? The idea is that you can get a friend to help you clean up a piece by performing basic editing work on it. Of course, this friend is hopefully a writer of moderately decent skills too.
Good Writers, Inexperienced Editors
Even if you’re both good writers, there’s a good chance that neither of you brings enough experience as an editor. That could be an issue, so it is good to establish a base about what you will each do.
Proofreading
For the most part, I’d recommend doing away with proofreading altogether. Correcting case, punctuation, spelling and tense is important, but it’s something you should be able to handle on your own, especially with the help of an editing software.
What You Should Focus On
During peer editing, it’s best for each of you to focus on aspects of writing that aren’t as easy to fix automatically. Specifically, it’s best to focus each other’s energies in areas such as:
-content
-structure
-readability
-and form
Yep, those things sound more difficult than catching misspellings. But that’s exactly what you need a peer editor for.
Notations
An important thing to consider is to develop a guideline for your editing notations. This will make it easier to both jot down potential improvements and understand those suggestions. Consult an editing guidebook to draw ideas from.
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Category: Writing
Keywords: editing, peer editing