tips on editing

by katherine swain
1st March 2013

Hi..has anyone got any tips they can share when editing and changing words .. I find it difficult and time consuming sometimes to make a sentence make sense.

when editing a long sentence sometimes the words don't flow and I try to swap them around chop and change them , then fear i have made the sentence too short...any tips on this??

Cheers,

Kat.

Replies

With long sentences, I try to prune them back into two, three or even four shorter ones. Once I have done that, I will either manually replace repetitions or cheat and use MS Word's thesaurus function.

I also find websites like http://dictionary.reference.com/ and http://thesaurus.com/ very useful if I can't find an appropriate word replacement.

Also, what I call a "versus" search in Google is useful for similar words which you aren't sure about. (For example, search on "effect vs affect" or "they're vs their vs there", etc).

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Robert Gill
01/03/2013

Oh - I use the search function a lot - with obvious tags like "iamhere" "wordcount" "todo" or "needswork" to navigate quickly between different areas. Without these I'd be lost within a few pages.

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Nicola
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Nicola Robinsonova
01/03/2013

I can't add to what David has said good advice Kat :)

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