A first look at a draft can appear to be a mess. It might include long, confusing sentences; repeated words; paragraphs of unequal length; punctuation issues; and a handful of words that just seem off the bat. Your temptation might be to correct the first sentence you see as clunky or ungrammatical. While that’s definitely productive, it can cause you to make small fixes before getting the overall feel for what the text is trying to say. Good editing begins with reading.
Before you begin to tweak wording, read the whole draft once with a single question in mind. What is this text asking the reader to understand, believe, do, or remember? It’s a question you can ask of almost every type of writing: from a brief informational article to a webpage for an online course, an email, a set of instructions, or even an event announcement. Try to put the central message into one straightforward sentence. If you cannot do that after a single read, then the draft may have a problem with its structure instead of individual sentences. Writing it down will help you avoid pouring your efforts into commas when the actual problem is paragraph order.
On the second read, you’re going to look for the flow of the draft and the reader’s experience. Look at where the first sentence leads; where the key idea arrives; and the movement of individual paragraphs. You’re not proofreading yet. Instead, you’re checking paragraph logic, transitions, repetition, and missing context. If you see two paragraphs saying much the same thing in different words, mark them both before deciding what to cut. Or if a paragraph includes a useful idea but it’s in the wrong spot, write a margin comment like “move after explanation” instead of editing it then.
A helpful exercise for a beginning editor is to make notes in a draft with a few different types of marks before doing any editing. Make one kind of note for meaning, another for structure, and a third for wording. Maybe a meaning note would say, “main point unclear here”; a structure note, “this example belongs later”; or a wording note, “sentence too long.” This helps you keep your thinking about the revision organized and it helps keep every problem from seeming equally urgent. You don’t need to treat a typographical error with the same importance as a transition, or a stilted phrase with the same importance as a paragraph that doesn’t belong at all.
It can happen that new editors make a draft sound smoother and better, but somehow less like its original writer. This can occur when every sentence is made more efficient in the same way. Your first read helps avoid this. As you read through, keep track of a draft’s voice and tone. Do we expect it to sound calm, straight-to-the-point, friendly, business formal, instructional, or chatty? You want a line edit to improve clarity, but keep its voice. You should cut unnecessary words if they do serve a function, but don’t delete every soft phrase or the draft will sound choppy. You can make more direct nouns clearer, but if you change too much of the vocabulary, the text will read as if it were written by another person entirely.
You should only start making revisions in your draft after the reading is done. Go with the biggest problem you found first. If a draft obscures its central point, make sure to draw more attention to it. If two ideas are repeating themselves, see if you can merge them or discard one. If the order is confusing, adjust the flow of the paragraphs rather than cleaning up each individual sentence. You can then make your way into tightening individual sentences, making slight tone adjustments, correcting grammar, and doing a final proofread. The final proof should be last because names, numbers, heading text, spacing, punctuation, and typographical errors are easier to check once the text is no longer changing around.
An encouraging sign of progress is not the speed of your editing. It’s that the notes you make are more useful. Instead of just saying, “awkward,” you start to write “unclear subject,” “repeated idea,” “tone is too stiff,” or “transition missing.” Your notes are helping you see the draft as a whole piece rather than a series of separate sentences. Before the next round of editing, stop on the first page of the draft and put the main point into one sentence. If the revision you’re about to make doesn’t contribute to that statement, it can probably be deferred.