A sea of red

I hate editing. Actually, let me clarify that.. I hate editing my own work.

Editing other people’s work, whilst a skill some people prefer not to employ, can be a rewarding task. Obviously it needs to be done objectively, regardless of whether you know the person who’s work your are editing or not. Grammar editing is relatively easy, as long as you know the basics yourself and marking an entire paragraph as needing to be written can prompt a writer to re-look at the work from a different angle.

Unfortunately, doing the above is a laborious task when its your own work involved. Grammar editing is again, relatively easy. Changing a word or sentence structure on the fly is normally something that can be done in a short amount of time. Reading a paragraph, or two and thinking they just don’t make sense means you immediately try and think of how to re-write it. This then has the nasty habit of breaking your concentration on editing and switches your focus back to writing again. Do this a couple of times over the course of a longer piece and the editing task takes hours, or days.

So far the Time Traveller’s Teacher is eight pages of red pen marks and five pages of unread work still to be looked at again. Its something I really need to finish doing and the only way I can see to do that is to stop trying to fix it as I go. Of course, after that I’ll probably look at getting someone else to do the editing task again. I hope its not as stressful a task for them also.

One final note, don’t edit when you are stressed and distracted at work, it really doesn’t do anyone any good.