Editing with flair

- Before we continue on with our journey, I want you to take a deep breath and congratulate yourself for coming this far on this incredibly challenging journey. Let's also take a moment to stop and think about what you've learned so far. After exploring the mindset of elite writers, I taught you a powerful perspective that will help to dramatically improve your writing, and I call that perspective the secret sauce of good writing. And I told you that this secret sauce was made up of four ingredients that would help you to write with impeccable style. And those ingredients, you remember? Simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. I also told you that it was important to know not only how to optimize those four ingredients in your writing, but also how to balance them for the best results. Compromising, maybe even sacrificing, one ingredient for another whenever necessary. Now, in this section, I'm going to introduce you to a second really powerful writing perspective, and it's one that I refer to as my deep editing system. Because it's great for editing anything, including your own and other people's writing. The system involves looking at your writing, not through the lens of the four ingredients, but through the lens of four dimensions. And that's why I also call this perspective the four dimensions of exceptional prose. Now, there is some natural crossover between this and the secret sauce framework, as you'll soon begin to see. But as a framework though, it has its own utility too because when you see writing through this lens, it's going to give you new insights, even if some of the ground that the two perspectives cover is similar. Now, this deep editing framework that I'll be teaching you in this section allows you to edit a piece of writing very thoroughly, indeed. Much more thoroughly in fact, than a copy editor might do who's just checking a document for spelling, grammar, punctuation mistakes, or typos. In other words, this framework goes much deeper. So, what is this deep editing framework and what are these four dimensions of writing? Well, first off, there is the content dimension of your writing. That's a dimension all by itself. When we say content, we are referring to the actual content of what you're saying in your writing. The ideas you're expressing, the points you're making, the questions you're asking in the text, the arguments you're raising or maybe countering. That's what I mean by your content. It's the actual stuff in the piece of writing itself. Now, to make your content dimension better, there are a bunch of useful questions that you could ask about it to enable you to bring it up to a high standard. And soon I'll show you what those questions are. The next dimension is the structure dimension of your writing. Now, this should be a bit more familiar to you, because by structure, what I mean is very similar to the narrative that I had discussed in a previous section. When you're editing, it's useful to see this as a dimension of its own, because all content, once it's been checked and perfected as much as possible, has to then be organized which means it has to be placed into a structure that pulls or holds all the content together nicely. So, whenever I was editing another person's writing, I'd always have to check not only that the content was up to scratch, but that the structure was up to a good enough standard. In other words, that it was organized brilliantly. Now, I don't need to teach you too much about structure here because I've covered it earlier to a large extent. When we looked at creating an elegant narrative, remember? But suffice it to say that after you've addressed the content level of your writing, you can similarly ask a bunch of specific questions about the way it's structured in order to improve that dimension as well. And I'm going to show you what those questions are. Okay, the third dimension of a piece of writing after its content and its structure is what I call its style dimension. Once you've ensured the content is great, the structure is great, I'll teach you that you can also ask a bunch of questions about the style of the writing to improve its quality. And here's where you start to see the crossover again because the style dimension is really about the four ingredients, because style is about making a piece of writing read well, and we've seen how to do that already using the simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness framework, haven't we? Now, if you're confused, don't worry. It will all make sense soon, but for now, all you need to do is understand the third dimension of a piece of writing after its content and its structure is its style. And finally, you have a fourth dimension of a piece of writing, and that's what I refer to as its presentation aspect. And here, I'm referring to the more cosmetic side of your writing that again, we touched upon in the secret sauce lesson on elegant presentation if you recall that one. Here, it's about looking closely at how your writing is presented to your audience, which is very important, especially if you want your writing to be seen as professional, credible, or authoritative. And this is also why newspapers and book publishers tend to have a very high standard when it comes to the presentation of a piece of writing. Now, as with the other three dimensions, I'm going be giving you a specific bunch of questions that you can ask about the presentation of your writing that will help to bring that up to a high standard. So, as you see, much of this section will build upon and integrate stuff that we've learned earlier. But I want you to understand that merely seeing your writing through this lens of four dimensions will once again increase the leverage that you have over the quality of your prose. Okay, so there you have the four dimensions of exquisite prose. Content, structure, style, and presentation to merge together with the four ingredients of simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. Now, I want you to keep this four dimensions framework alive in your mind whenever you are editing anything because I think it's the best one that there is. Now, one other thing before we begin exploring the four dimensions of exquisite prose. Although I'll be going through the four dimensions one at a time, in practice I no longer actually do this myself. That's because I know each dimension so intimately from years of editing that I'm able to travel between the dimensions without thinking about them much. Kind of like an experienced driver can drive a car without having to consciously think about how to change the gears. It becomes pretty much automatic. But for beginners, I'm going to cover each dimension individually so that you can fully appreciate its unique dynamics. Later, when you become more confident in your editing, you too will likely operate across all dimensions at once. And there's one more thing. As this course is a crash course in writing well, there's only so much I can go into in each section of the course. So that's why for anyone whose appetite is stirred and who is hungry to go even deeper into these dimensions, I would consider enrolling in my course, Editing Mastery, which is also available via my website, shaniraja.com. However, you'll find that what I teach here is enough to give your writing and editing a major boost. So, come with me and let's explore the four dimensions of exquisite prose.