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Writing for a Living: Editing Your Own Work
Highest Rated
Rating: 4.7 out of 5(19 ratings)
164 students

Writing for a Living: Editing Your Own Work

Editing
Created byStefan Petrucha
Last updated 11/2021
English

What you'll learn

  • How to recognize and correct redundancy in all three forms.
  • How to recognize and correct run-on sentences.
  • How to recognize and correct tense drift.
  • How story structure governs the best way to structure, sentences, paragraphs and scenes.

Course content

4 sections8 lectures2h 19m total length
  • Introduction11:12

    This lecture sets out the basic goals of editing in terms of making sure our writing points to the fictive world, rather than the words, and describes the content of the entire course.

Requirements

  • For beginner and intermediate writers.

Description

99% of writing is rewriting. So, if you’re a writer, unless you’re somehow magically able to set down one brilliant pristine passage after another, you will spend a lot of time rewriting. Some rewriting uses the same creative process that got you there in the first place; adding and/or substantially changing ideas, characters, locations and plot points, which I’ll refer to here as revising the content.

This course isn’t about that, it’s about the other, let’s say 48.5%; editing, taking a hard, unflinching look at what you’ve already got. And that’s not just about correcting typos or other mistakes, otherwise known as proofreading. Editing involves cutting, restructuring, streamlining, and otherwise honing that beautiful muse-inspired mess, so it becomes the best possible version of itself, ready for readers to enjoy, or for a professional editor to rip into all over again while you stand by, whimpering. This course shows you how to do that in eight handy-dandy lectures:

1. Introduction.

2. Magic Typos and Getting Tense. If you’re an expert proofreader and/or grammarian, feel free to skip this one. If not, don’t, especially if you’ve always wondered what future perfect continuous means.

3. The Vile Beast Redundancy and its Sidekick Overuse – Redundancy in all its forms being the biggest impediment to good writing, second only to an unhealthy attachment to our work.

4. Story describes how the same dynamic of tension and release that governs narrative, governs the best way to structure the subjects of the next three lectures, sentences, paragraphs and scenes.

5. Editing Sentences

6. Editing Paragraphs

7. Editing Scenes

From there, but way of review, I dare to take a look at some passages from the works of famous authors and yes, for better or worse, edit them, in:

8. Editing the Rich and Famous

No additional software or equipment required.

Who this course is for:

  • Writers of any kind who want to take their work to the next level.