Effective Editing

How to Take Your Writing to the Next Level

By: Molly McCowan, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Professor Molly McCowan

Editing your own work is difficult, but it’s a crucial skill to master if you want to be a successful writer. After all, writing goes far beyond simply creating a rough draft - it’s how the work evolves from a rough draft to a finished piece that separates the good from the great. And as anyone who’s tried their hand at revising a novel or memoir can tell you, it’s all too easy to become mired in the details rather than see the bigger picture, merely focusing on the trees and forgetting the forest, until it grows unwieldy and overwhelming.

The tendency during the revision process to focus on the “little picture” versus the “big picture” can be overcome with the right tools and perspective. This is where Effective Editing: How to Take Your Writing to the Next Level comes in. Book coach and editor Molly McCowan takes you through the self-editing process in 13 detailed lessons, using a step-by-step method designed to reduce overwhelm and to structure the revision process in the most productive way possible. Working from the big to the little picture of your work, Molly shows you how to strengthen character development, find and fix plot holes, build stronger scenes, focus on smooth pacing and point-of-view issues, elevate your language, and much more.

The focus of this course is for you to improve your narrative writing skills, including fiction and nonfiction, such as memoir, autobiography, biography, and personal essays. Molly’s tips and tools throughout the course can help any writer edit their own work with skill and confidence.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 The Great Courses (P)2021 The Teaching Company, LLC

Useful and thoughtful

It's a good, clear guide to learn how to self-edit, how to find an editor, and, most importantly, why editing matters.

If you aren't finished with your first draft, then this has advice you don’t need yet, but it's still very useful

Solid Guide on Editing and Writing

This is an excellent book on editing and writing. The lecturer starts off by explaining the four types of editing. Make sure the plot and structure make sense (developmental editing) before tweaking sentences chapter by chapter (line editing). A copyeditor would check for grammar and typos. A proofreader would look at the proof copy of the book (hence, a proofreader) and check for typos and page appearance. As the lecturer gives advice on developmental editing, it really becomes a lecture about writing (or rewriting bad prose). There are many "before" and "after" examples so you can see how bad writing can be fixed.

Have Something To Edit Before Listening

This course gives a very brief overview of what editing your own work entails but I would have liked it to be a bit more indepth. It's really just a quick overview of everything, instead of really getting into the nitty gritty of editing your own manuscript.

You'll get way more out of this if you have a finished manuscript to work with.

EXCELLENT

This was an incredibly useful course! I have read many many books on writing. This book helped me to understand how I can take my writing to the next level. I highly recommend it.

Loved it.

As a writer, I found this very helpful. I especially appreciated the tidbits on why still hiring a professional and the end is needed. This is one of those essential listens that you will go back over again to glean more.