Before and After Editing Activity

This decision based editing strategy will help you find new ways to edit your sentences.

Hello, Sentence Makers!

A small change can have a big impact, especially when you are editing your own writing. At the heart of editing is reading your sentences, words, and punctuation to make sure your ideas are expressed in a clear and memorable way for your readers. Usually, a writer will edit sentences near the end of his/her writing process, but editing can happen anytime.

For this workshop, I will ask you to delete 10-15 words from ONE paragraph found inside any of your college essays. When you have to think about what words to delete, you will also need to think about how deleting these words will impact your other sentences. I call this catalyst thinking, when one editing decision leads you to think of other editing decisions, and so on.

When you are engaged in catalyst thinking, you are doing the true work of editing. You are thinking deeply about your sentences and making decisions for how to make each one read better for you and your readers.

I certainly did not invent the idea of deleting words to edit a piece of writing. Professional writers and journalists are constantly asked to stay within a certain word count. They have to delete words every time they write a story, and they have to pay attention to how deleting these words impacts the rest of the sentences in their stories.

I call deleting words the Before and After editing strategy because you compare and contrast how your paragraph sounds before you deleted 10-15 words to how it sounds after you have deleted 10-15 words.

If you would like to see a demonstration of the Before and After strategy, go to the bottom of this post. A YouTube demonstrates how to use the Before and After editing strategy. As you watch the YouTube, notice how the writer narrates the editing decisions she makes as she deletes words and adjusts her sentences.

Here are the steps to follow to complete this workshop:

Step one: Choose ONE paragraph from any of your own essays to use for this workshop.

Step two: Open a new Word or Google.doc and copy and paste this paragraph TWICE into a new document. You should have two copies of the same paragraph in your document.

Step three: Label one paragraph the Before Paragraph and leave it alone. Do not delete any words or make any changes to this first paragraph.

Step four: Label the second copy of the paragraph the After Paragraph. Then proceed to delete 10 - 15 words from this paragraph. You may find that you delete more than 15 words, and this is okay!

Some hints for deciding which words to delete:

• You may delete big or small words. Any word can be deleted, including words like and, to, or it.
  

• You may also delete a full sentence, but be warned! Make sure that sentence is absolutely unnecessary in your paragraph. You may decide that deleting some of the words from a sentence may work better for you.
  

• As you delete words, pay careful attention to how deleting the words impacts your other sentences. You will most certainly need to make adjustments and edits to your other sentences after you delete your 10 - 15 words.

Step five: After you have deleted words from your paragraph, and after you have made edits and adjustments to the remaining sentences, read your newly edited paragraph. Reflect on how deleting the words from your paragraph led you to rethink your sentences by answering these four questions.

Create thoughtful responses for each of the questions below:

1. Why did you decide to delete certain words over others?

2. How did deleting these words lead you to other kinds of editing decisions?

3. What were some other editing decisions you had to make after you deleted words?

4. What surprised you most as you completed this activity?