The New Year was a couple of weeks ago now, but for various reasons I’m still in a reflective mood. I’m also re-visiting a bit of writing work I did to tight deadlines and finding – much to my horror – that I’d not done the job I’d wanted to do on it.
Looking back on past work is always like this, however, as an individual’s writing style and skills develop over time. Indeed, it can be a good thing to do from time to time; look back on past writing and reflect on how you’d do it differently nowadays. It could be, of course, that there’s a technique, a style, or a turn of phrase you used to use that you’ve dropped for whatever reason; there’s nothing wrong with going back to old work and re-discovering something from it.
Here are just a few exercises to do with a bit of old writing (you can do them with someone else’s copy, but you’ll be less familiar with it) to keep your editing skills up to date – and to keep note of for future writing work:
- Â Trim it down – try to say exactly the same in half as many words. You’ll probably be able to do it; it might not be the best writing you’ve ever done once it’s shorter, but cutting down content to a word count is a useful skill to have. Being able to do it to extremes is a good way of practising this skill.
- Passive/active – if it’s written in a passive voice, make it active. If it’s active, make it passive. While the passive voice is dull and not always the best for engaging web writing, some clients need it; anything political and contentious is far better written in the passive voice because it’s less likely to be accusatory, or the subject might not be known. Science writing is also usually in a passive voice, giving the emphasis to the science – not the scientists. There’s a good (if very simple) lesson on the passive voice here.
- Re-summarise – write an executive summary for the work. It’s a better exercise to do this blind; read it all, then put the source away somewhere and write the executive summary. Read it back again with the source material to hand. You’ll see what from the source you’ve picked up on as important points – have a think about why you’re remembering those points, and if they’re really the key parts.
- Re-punctuate – open the document in Word (or Open Office, or whatever you use) and before you read any of it, select all > change case and select “lower case”. Then (again, before reading any of it) do a find and replace and replace every comma, full stop, colon, semi-colon, em-dash and en-dash with a space. Do one final find-replace and take out all the double spaces you would have created. Now re-punctuate the whole document to make it make sense. Compare to the original.
Hopefully these exercises will open your eyes to the way your writing has changed over time – the older the work you can re-visit, the better. They’re also good exercises to make you think about one particular aspect of your writing – whether it’s the voice you use, how you punctuate, or how many words you use. Most of all, enjoy what you do, and don’t cringe at old work – feel proud you’re now better able to spot those old mistakes!