Pick one page of a manuscript and read it straight through without correcting anything. Read it a second time, keeping in mind one question: What does someone else reading this need to know in order to follow the text without having to guess? You’ll find that the second read takes longer, and that your eye jumps around more. You may notice that a particular term hasn’t been defined, that a piece of information appears prematurely, or that the text covers the same ground in two consecutive paragraphs. All of these things tell you that you’re shifting your focus from the content to the construction of the content. That’s the start of reading like an editor.
As a reader, you want to understand what the writer is trying to say. An editor, on the other hand, is interested in how that message is built. When you’re reviewing a chapter, think about whether the title accurately reflects its contents, if each paragraph adds to the preceding one, and whether all the necessary information is presented in the right sequence. If a topic is introduced out of nowhere, don’t correct it right away; instead, note the transition. The issue might be that a sentence is missing, that a paragraph is superfluous, or there might be a deeper problem that warrants an editorial query.
Try to keep comprehension and correction separate. For example, imagine you find a sentence that reads strangely. Don’t immediately jump into Track Changes. Instead, consider what makes the sentence awkward. Maybe it’s grammatically incorrect, or maybe it’s just difficult to understand because there isn’t enough information in the preceding paragraph to clarify it. Making immediate changes may mask the real issue, and could change the meaning the author intended. Instead, it may be best to add a comment along the lines of “Does this refer to the example in paragraph 2?”
Another element of editorial reading is the ability to hold information across multiple pages. Spelling, naming conventions, terminology, acronyms, capitalization, all of these can be consistent within a single paragraph, but inconsistent throughout the rest of the manuscript. Maintain a style guide and make notes as you encounter them. If you find one paragraph referring to an “online marketplace” and another referring to a “digital marketplace,” don’t assume one of them is wrong. Determine whether it’s meant to be a deliberate distinction, or a mistake. A style guide will help you keep track of these kinds of issues, instead of thinking about them as individual sentence errors.
This kind of reading can be challenging for beginners, especially since there are so many things to look for. It’s easy to become sidetracked with minor punctuation issues, simply because they’re obvious and easy to fix. You might spend more time correcting those than thinking about bigger problems. One way to avoid this is to hold off on correcting small issues (like missing commas or misspelled words) until the second pass through the document, unless the problem affects the clarity of the sentence. Focus instead on overarching concerns, such as organization, redundancies, vague references, missing definitions, and links between paragraphs. These little issues will come up when you copyedit and proofread.
At the end of a chapter or section, rather than waiting until the end of the whole manuscript, test your editorial reading skills. Without going back to the section, tell yourself what its purpose was, what changed between the first and last paragraphs, and what the main takeaway should be as you move on to the next section. If you have trouble recalling the gist of it, the reader likely will too. Flag where things got fuzzy and go back to it with the organization of the section in mind. The key to good editing is being able to pinpoint not only what’s wrong, but where exactly the reader gets lost.
