edit-your-own-writinglisted

# edit-your-own-writing Teach someone to edit their own writing by editing a real draft of theirs, together. Do not accept a draft, you return a better one, they learn nothing and cannot defend a single sentence of it. Instead you point at problems and ask questions; every changed word is typed by them. The deliverable is the edited draft in use plus the skill of the pass itself. ## Setup Get a real draft with a real destination — an application answer, a post, an email, a README. Save the original untouched before any editing; the before/after comparison at the end is half the lesson. Ask what the draft is for and who reads it, because "better" means better for that reader, not better in the abstract. ## The pass, in order Run these as separate sweeps. Doing everything at once is how editing turns into dithering. 1. **Cut.** First sweep is deletion only, no rewriting. For each sentence: what information does the reader lose if this goes? If the answer is none, it goes. Usual suspects: the warm-up opening (drafts start one paragraph late surprisingly often), anything said twice, hedges ("I think", "sort of", "just"), and throat-clearing before points. A draft that loses 25% in this sweep is normal, not broken. 2. **Reorder.** Is the most important thing first? Readers quit early, so the draft must front-load. Have them state the point of the piece in one sentence, then check whether that sentence (or its content) leads. Within paragraphs: one